A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh

Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

I have a confession to make. This is only the second book by Nalini Singh I’ve ever read (the other being an old Harlequin that I remember enjoying over a decade ago!). I know she’s the author of a number of very successful series, including the hugely popular PsyChangeling books – but I just haven’t found the time to pick up any of them (one of these days…). So when I saw that she was branching out into the suspense genre with A Madness of Sunshine, a standalone title set in her homeland of New Zealand, I was intrigued; and seeing that the excellent Saskia Maarleveld had signed on to narrate it just cemented my decision to pick up the book in audio.

Anahera Rawiri returns to her hometown of Golden Cove on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island eight years after turning her back on it forever, or so she’d hoped at the time. Having pursued a glamorous career as a classical pianist, Anahera based herself in London, but decided to return to NZ following the death of her famous playwright husband, who – she’d discovered after his death – had not only cheated on her but left his mistress pregnant. Even though she’d worked hard to get away from Golden Cove, a small, provincial town that offered no prospects, something has called Anahera back there, and she decides to make her home in the remote cabin that she had lived in with her late mother.

Detective Will Gallagher is the town’s one-man police department. He’s one of the few people in Golden Cove who isn’t from Golden Cove, and even though he’s been there for over a year, many of the locals still view him as an outsider. A highly decorated and experienced officer, Will was sent to Golden Cove after a domestic abuse case he was working went badly wrong, resulting in the deaths of the woman and child he’d sworn to protect. Unable to simply fire him, his superiors pretty much put him out to pasture and forgot about him; and now he mostly spends his time breaking up bar fights, or calming down neighbourhood disputes. It suits him, for the most part.

But that changes when nineteen-year-old Miriama Hinewai Tutaia goes missing after heading out for a run. Miri is beautiful (as we are told many, many times) and vibrant, with a smile so bright it was as if the sun had come out; she’s the town’s darling and everybody loves her. She lives with her aunt, a close friend of Anahera’s late mother, and works at the local café, which is owned by Anahera’s best friend Josie, so of course Anahera, like everyone else in town, is eager to join in the search.

Anahera is guarded and a bit prickly towards Will on their first meeting, and becomes even moreso when he manages to say the wrong thing at their second. But as the hours and days pass with no sign of Miriama, and the likelihood of finding her alive lessens, Will starts to realise that if he’s to make any headway, he needs the help of someone with knowledge of the townsfolk and the town’s history, an insider like Anahera, whom people are likely to open up to and not be suspicious of. But then the unexpected discovery of a set of human remains at the local rubbish dump blows Will’s investigation wide open; could Miriama’s disappearance be linked to the murder, fifteen years earlier, of three young female hikers? As Will and Anahera work together to find out the truth, they discover layer upon layer of secrets, lies and betrayals, some of them things that someone is prepared to kill to keep hidden.

A Madness of Sunshine is a character-driven suspense novel featuring well-drawn characters and an intriguing and well put-together plot. The pacing is perhaps a little slow for the first half/two-thirds of the book, but that allows the author plenty of time to flesh out her characters and explore the complex relationships between them, as well as to create and build the atmosphere of menace that permeates the small coastal town. That said however, there’s really nothing new here. We’ve got the ex-big city cop with a troubled past, the damaged widow, the beautiful victim everyone loved… in fact, the real standouts of the book for me were the author’s descriptions of the landscape and locations – which painted wonderful pictures in my mind – the culture and traditions of the area and people, and her insight into the problems faced by a small, rural community like the one depicted. There’s a large cast of characters, but many felt underused; and as we neared the end, it began to seem as though every single male inhabitant of Golden Cove – except Will – had some horrible, dark secret that pointed to them as the likely killer; it was one (or six) red-herrings too many. And I could probably have made a drinking game out of the number of times we were told how beautiful and vibrant and perfect Miriama was!

I was also a little disappointed by the ending. The identity of the villain(s) was fairly easy to work out, and it seemed to me that Will’s major breakthrough happened largely off the page; I prefer mysteries where I can follow the clues along with the characters and am privy to their thought processes, so this was a bit of a let-down.

So, I had some issues with the story, but none at all with Saskia Maarleveld’s narration, which was absolutely superb. (Her bio indicates she was raised partly in New Zealand, so she was the pretty much the ideal choice to narrate this book!) In fact, I suspect it was her performance that got me through some of the slower parts of the audio; her husky, mellifluous voice is easy on the ear, her pacing is spot on, and she thoroughly captures the varied personality traits of the characters, differentiating effectively between all of them. With such a large cast, it’s difficult to assign every character a different ‘voice’, and there were indeed a couple of characters who sounded similar, but these tended to be peripheral and didn’t appear in scenes together. Ms. Maarleveld infuses her entire performance with a gently lilting New Zealand accent which she tones up or down as required by the characters, and delivers a wonderfully nuanced and expressive performance all round.

I enjoyed A Madness of Sunshine in spite of its flaws, but what really made it for me was the narration, which both papered over some of the cracks in the storytelling and elevated it to the next level. I certainly wouldn’t say no to more suspense novels from Ms. Singh – and if Ms. Maarleveld narrates them, then so much the better!

Caz

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