Better the Blood

Hana Westerman is a Māori detective in Auckland's CIB, bringing up a teenage daughter alone and facing racism on the job. An anonymous video leads her to a man hanged ritually in a concealed room, and a second, apparently unconnected death soon follows. She traces both to 1863, when six British soldiers put a Māori chief to death without justice, a scene captured in an early photograph. Someone is now killing the soldiers' descendants as utu, to restore the balance, and four more could die. The case becomes painfully personal: it recalls the land occupation that Hana, then a young officer, helped break up by force on the same mountain, and a family connection to the soldiers puts her own people at risk.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand

Series

Hana Westerman, book 1

First published

2022 by Simon & Schuster

Author's age

58 when first published

ISBN

9781398512221 (Simon & Schuster, United Kingdom)

9780802160607 (Atlantic Monthly Press, United States)

9780802162656 (Grove Press, United States)