{"id":2131,"date":"2022-07-14T16:56:42","date_gmt":"2022-07-14T16:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2131"},"modified":"2023-04-02T22:59:07","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T22:59:07","slug":"better-the-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2131","title":{"rendered":"Better the Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A tight and tense police investigation that brilliantly integrates M\u0101ori culture and history. When a gruesome murder in contemporary Auckland, with the victim found hanging in a secret room within an abandoned building, leads to another murder, M\u0101ori detective Hana Westerman realizes she may be on the trail of New Zealand\u2019s first serial killer. But what connects the victims? A daguerreotype from New Zealand\u2019s bloody, colonial past\u2014plus texts and images the killer sends her\u2014provide Hana with a terrifying road map to what\u2019s ahead if she can\u2019t stop him. Through Hana, author Michael Bennett (Ngati Pikiao, Ngati Whakaue) connects the past and the present, both in New Zealand\u2019s history and within Hana\u2019s own life. To find the killer; keep her family safe, especially her university-age, politically charged daughter; and face a painful incident from her youth, Hana must undergo a transformation. And the woman we meet at the end of the narrative is indeed far different from the one who begins it. <strong>This is crime fiction at its best: well-paced, richly characterized, and fearless in confronting the pain of colonialism.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A tight and tense police investigation that brilliantly integrates M\u0101ori culture and history. When a gruesome murder in contemporary Auckland, with the victim found hanging in a secret room within&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[148,55,65,164,50,51],"class_list":["post-2131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-indigenous","tag-mystery-detective","tag-police-procedural","tag-star","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Better-the-Blood-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Better-the-Blood.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}