Author(s): Russell Haley

NZ Fiction

Jervis Kraik is beaten up and stabbed in Auckland's Fort Street. He wakes up in Whare Moemoea, a dubious medical institution on Auckland's North Shore. But was Jervis really attacked? And is Moira, Kraik's nurse, there to help him or to tempt him into ...what? Haley's new novel, his fifth, is an atmospheric mystery. It is also a transgressive love story where Kraik's half conscious desires are tainted with guilt and regret. The writing is, at one moment, deadpan, reminiscent perhaps of Raymond Chandler's thrillers and then, surprisingly, we encounter dreamlike sequences that have emerged from Jervis Kraik's troubled mind.