Lead Review

• Book: Containment
• Location: Aramoana, Dunedin
• Author: Vanda Symon

Review Author: tripfiction

The novel is published to coincide with International’s Women’s Month (March). It is shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime novel.

Much of the setting is at Aramoana Beach, a township north of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand. It is a setting that in real life experienced a massacre of 13 people in 1990. So it already has a dark history.

DC Sam Shepherd arrives early on the scene of a boat wreck, where a container ship, the Lauretia Express, has capsized and tipped a container onto the beach, spilling its contents. Local inhabitants are already out, looting some of the better items. As a note of interest, apparently 1400 shipping containers on average go overboard from ships every year, spreading their contents far and wide – just think about the spillage of 28,000 rubber ducks that have made their way around the world after the container, in which they were travelling, fell overboard (see Blue Planet for further details)!

Sam is badly assaulted on the beach but the perpetrator is caught. Once she is sufficiently recovered, she is thrown in at the deep end and has to start investigating the death of a diver. The retrieved body has, in part, been eaten away and is in a terrible state, the pungent odour clinging to everyone and everything. It is hard to assess how the body came to be in the water.

Are there any links to be made between her assault, the wrecked container and the body that has been fished from the sea?

Sam is a sassy character, a complex woman who eschews intimacy, although her friends try hard to persuade her that Paul, her squeeze, is a lovely man – if only she could see it. She withstands the banter of her department, remains resolute in the face of her overbearing boss and is prepared to cross boundaries to ensure the best outcome for the investigation. But her transgressions could cost her her job.

I very much enjoyed the carefully planned narrative, each new piece of the jigsaw fitted well and the author has plotted out a sequentially convincing story. I am looking forward to meeting DC Sam Shephard in her next outing (perhaps she will be DCI by then, a promotion that she would just love! 😉 Fingers crossed!)

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