Fallout

New Zealand author Thomas brilliantly combines subgenres in his richly textured fifth Tito Ihaka mystery (after 2013’s Death on Demand), offering a fair-play whodunit, a riveting procedural, and a hard-boiled Maori sleuth who would be at home on the mean streets of James Ellroy’s L.A. Tito’s mentor, Auckland District Commander Finbar McGrail, has spent 27 years living with the unsolved murder of 17-year-old Polly Stenson, who was strangled at an election-night party held at a merchant banker’s mansion. A new lead gives McGrail some hope that the case can be closed, and he assigns Tito to pursue it. Meanwhile, Tito learns that his father, a “union firebrand and renegade Marxist,” may not have died of a heart attack. The complex, well-constructed plot is matched by moving prose, as in McGrail’s meeting with Polly’s parents in 1987 to let them know the case was stalled: “It was even possible, he thought, that they feared catharsis might compromise the emptiness they now accepted as their destiny.” [em](Apr.) [/em]