More than 15 years after its first publication, internationally bestselling Kiwi author Paul Cleave’s powerful debut The Cleaner will hit screens around the world next year, having been adapted into six-part TV drama Dark City. Before then, however, readers can soak into the brilliant darkness of Cleave’s world with this page-chewing tale.
One of many enticing aspects of The Pain Tourist, the 13th novel from the Crown Prince of Antipodean Noir (who’s a three-time Ngaio Marsh Award winner who’s also been shortlisted for major prizes in the United States) is the much-awaited return of troubled investigator Theo Tate, last seen in 2014’s award-winning Five Minutes Alone. Though Tates, who’s now left the police, is co-star here to James Garrett, a young man who emerges from a coma nine years after he was shot the night his parents were killed in a botched home invasion. Tate investigated the original crime; the culprits never found. Now DI Rebecca Kent is charged with closing the very cold case, while also hunting a dangerous killer, ‘Copy Joe’, mimicking the infamous Christchurch Carver.
Matters are further complicated by James’ eidetic recollection of an entire life he ‘lived out’ during his long coma, which seems to crossover with real events. Did he overhear a killer’s confession? Cleave delivers a superb tale, masterfully balancing multiple viewpoints, investigations, and ongoing threats – all building to a thrilling crescendo.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul is Christchurch (NZ) born and raised, and other than a couple of years when he was living in London and bouncing around Europe a little, he’s always lived there. He started writing at nineteen when a friend asked him the classic question of ‘if there’s anything in life you could do for a living, what would it be?’ The answer was simple. He wanted to be a writer.
For the next five years he worked in the evenings on manuscripts that he has promised will never be taken out of the bottom drawer. Back then he wanted to write horror, and it was a few years in when he realised that crime – real life crime – is horror. As he says, people don’t come home from vampire movies and lock their doors to keep them out, but they will come home from a movie like Silence of the Lambs and lock their doors incase the neighbour is planning on eating them. When he made that connection, he turned to writing dark crime fiction, writing first The Killing Hour, and then The Cleaner, in his mid-twenties. Not long after that Paul sold his house and lived with his parents so he could write full time – a gamble that paid off a few years later when Random House signed him up. From that point on he’s written his dark tales set in his home city, introducing Joe Middleton – the Christchurch Carver, and Melissa, and Theodore Tate, and Schroder, and Jerry Gray, among others to the world.
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