People Disappear in New Zealand

HANK: Yay! The theme continues—and it proves you don’t have to budge from your comfy chair. The Reds will take you to places you’ve never been. Prague? Sure. Underground Oklahoma City? No prob. And today?  Meet the brave and plucky Sara Johnson, the debut mystery author who, when love and curiosity called, picked up packed up and went—well, would you have done the same thing?

A Great Adventure

by Sara E. Johnson

     People ask how I got the idea to write the Alexa Glock mysteries set in New Zealand. It started when my husband proposed living in Aotearoa, “the land of the long white cloud,” for a year. Could we do it? I left my teaching job as a reading specialist at a Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school, three children (the youngest was a college sophomore), and cat, to find out.

((Ed. note via Wiki : Aotearoa; commonly pronounced by English speakers as /ˌaʊtɛəˈroʊ.ə/   is the Māori name for New Zealand. It was originally used by the Māori people in reference to only the North Island but, since the late 19th century, the word has come to refer to the country as a whole. Several meanings have been proposed for the name; the most popular meaning usually given is "long white cloud", or variations thereof. This refers to the cloud formations which helped early Polynesian navigators find the country.  Now to our regular programming. 

(Map from Gringer - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11342313 )

     

My first glimpse of the Southern Alps from an airplane left me chilled: jagged rows of snow-capped peaks raked the spine of the South Island not far from where we rented a house in Christchurch. The Canterbury area welcomed us with a three day “active front” which blew cars off the road and two trees down in our back “garden.” I loved the newspaper headline describing gusts of more than 222 kmh: “By Crikey it was windy.”

     A headline during our first week also caused me chills: “Chance of finding tourists alive very remote.” A Canadian couple driving a camper van disappeared while crossing Haast Pass. We planned to cross the same pass, one of three that bisect the Alps. We followed the story closely. It played out like this: first the wheels and chassis of the van were discovered 80 meters down a gorge in the Haast River. Most likely a rock slide from the same storm that welcomed us to this rugged country swept their van off the road. The next week the young woman's body was found on a downriver stretch of beach. The man's thigh bone was discovered three years later.

     People disappear in New Zealand.

     An early adventure was to the tip of the North Island, Cape Reinga, where the Maori believe the soul departs. It's a wild and spiritual place, and we could watch the Tasman Sea crash into the Pacific Ocean. Nearby, the Te Peki sand dunes rise 140 meters above the sea and attract attention. I joined a line of twenty-somethings trudging up the dunes in gale winds, my boogie board trying to escape, or carry me aloft, my bare feet sinking into the fine sand, so I could ”depart” from the crest.

     A body could disappear in this sand, I thought, and the idea for a mystery series crystallized.

     Thermal activity abounds on the North Island. The Rotorua area has the highest concentration of geysers, boiling springs, sinter terraces, sulphur pools, and mud pots in the world, and I was hot to visit. Skull and crossbone signs warned us, but even so, my husband dipped a finger into a steaming stream. “Get back,” I yelled, like a good wife. The year before, a boy slipped off the path and into one of the pools. Headline: Boy dies after being boiled alive in NZ thermal spring.

At the thermal mud pots I oohed at the bubbling stinking Hades, and knew I had to kill someone there. Molten Mud Murder takes place at those mud pots. My protagonist, Alexa Glock, must identify the remains through dental X-rays. Everything else boiled away.

     Foveaux Strait, separating the South Island and Stewart Island, is notoriously rough. The Maori call the wind whipping the strait hau-mate, or death wind. The year before we made the crossing, a rogue wave capsized a fishing boat, killing eight men. Tourists, like my husband and me, visit Stewart Island for many reasons: hiking (yes), birding (yes), hunting (no) and shark cage diving (NO). There are at least 44 tagged great white sharks in the area. They like to visit, too, and certainly could be blamed for a ravaged body washing ashore.

     That happens in the second Alexa Glock mystery, Chum (coming September, 2020). Was the shark really the culprit?

     My husband and I hiked the 33-mile Milford Track, “the finest walk in the world,” in sunshine. We could actually see the glacial streams, alpine passes, gushing waterfalls, sheer cliffs, and not fall off swing bridges. This is unusual. The area gets 268 inches of rain each year. One hiker blogged about being airlifted out halfway through, after 15 inches submerged the track. Shortly after we completed Milford, a hiker, right in front of her partner, was swept away in a swollen creek.

     But what if the partner gave a little shove? In book three, Alexa hikes the Milford Track. As she clutches the flimsy rail of a swinging bridge, she spots a body in the river below.

     We reached the Cape Kidnappers gannet colony on a trailer pulled by a 1949 Minneapolis-Moline tractor. The old tractor pulled us between the breaking waves and spectacular cliff formations. I was shocked to spot a golf course atop one cliff. Our tractor driver told us a rich American bought the land, built a house and golf course. Many Silicon Valley hedge fund managers have also bought New Zealand property, perhaps as doomsday escape hatches. New Zealand has since banned foreigners from buying homes. But this man already had, and what if his neighbors didn't like it? The clamor of thousands of gannets protecting their chicks would eclipse a scream for help.

     Book four, I think.

     There are countless ways this brutal landscape can swallow a body, and thus makes a perfect setting for the Alexa Glock mysteries. The cat is on my lap as I peck away back home in North Carolina.

HANK: Told you! Adventure! Anyone been to New Zealand? Do you want to? Did you know it was called Aotearoa?

MOLTEN MUD MURDER

When a body is found half-submerged in a Waiariki Thermal Land of Enchantment molten mud pot, forensics expert Alexa Glock, her specialty odontology, spots a way to prolong her stay in New Zealand. Her fellowship has ended and no one is waiting for her to return to the States. Men have never been her expertise, but teeth are. Other ways of identifying the body may have… melted away.

A determined Alexa barrels her way onto the scene and into the lives of Rotorua’s finest, especially Detective Inspector Bruce Horne. There’s something about his glacial blue eyes that gets under never-married Alexa’s skin, even though she’s sworn off men.

Danger lurks in “the land of the long white cloud.” The murder victim, a city councilman, had trespassed on a sacred island forbidden to Pakeha, or non-Maori, and Alexa must follow suit. The Maori community is incensed that the rules of tapu have been disregarded and the consequences are disaster, demonic possession, or death.

Say what?

Alexa doesn’t believe in these three D’s, but when she discovers an unorthodox death threat in her rented riverside Trout Cottage, she reconsiders. A second murder heats the case to the boiling point and reveals a molten mix of motives and suspects. At the heart of Molten Mud Murder is an age old debate: is the past better left undisturbed, or unearthed? And at what cost either way?

Sara E. Johnson’s debut novel, the start of a series based in New Zealand, presents a page-turning story of facing the past and cracking the door open to an unexpected future. Sara E. Johnson is a mystery writer who spent nine months exploring wondrous New Zealand. Everywhere she snooped, there was a mystery that needed writing. Molten Mud Murder, Sara’s debut novel, will be published September, 2019 by Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks. It is the first in the Alexa Glock Mystery series set in New Zealand.

Sara has a BA in Journalism and an MA in Education from the University of North Carolina.

Sara lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and golden doodle. She is a part-time educator and full time snooper. She is the current president of Triangle Sisters-in-Crime and a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.