‘Marlborough Man‘ is all about people and place. The place is beautiful in an austere, “I dare you to survive here” kind of way. The people are complicated and sometimes hard to like but always easy to believe in. 

‘Marlborough Man‘ is not a Location Thriller, selling local colour in lieu of a plot or an “I wonder what the cunning solution will be?” puzzle, it’s a “waiting for the bad thing(s) to happen and see who will survive” kind of thing. There’s a constant threat of violence and a strong sense of isolation that combine into a “You’ll either take care of this yourself or you won’t be around to worry about it” attitude which reflects the New Zealander “number 8 wire” problem-solving mindset. Add in the main character’s blunt Geordie cynicism and some local politics and the story feels muscular and sad.

I didn’t find ‘Marlborough Man‘ entertaining, it was too hard-edged for that, but I could see why it won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel in 2018. It’s a couple of weeks since I finished the book and it sits in my memory like a brooding landscape painting. 

The main character, Nick Chester, is an English policeman from Sunderland who, as part of a Witness Protection program following two years undercover trying to bring down a Geordie gangster, has been assigned as a Sergeant in a sleepy police station at the top New Zealand’s South Island.

The plot is driven by two sets of issues: the threat posed to Chester’s life when the gangster he informed on is released from prison and the investigation that Chester kicks off into the deaths of boys who, after being missing for a few days have been found dead. 

Most of the story is the present-day narrative in New Zealand but we also get flashbacks into Chester’s time undercover. 

For me, one of the strengths of the book is that Nick Chester is a deeply flawed man whose time undercover has shown him what his worst self looks like. He is a man who has a hard time liking himself but still tries to do the right thing, at least most of the time. 

The two threads of the plot, the investigation into the deaths and the threat from the gangster, run mostly parallelt to one another but both place stress on Nick Chester and on his relationships with the people around him. Sometimes that stress is destructive, Sometimes it strengthens allegiances. There’s no sugar-coating here just a bleakly plausible account of a man facing mounting problems.

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