While we’re on the theme of great Kapiti fiction (The Mires, Sea Change), Mandy Hager’s Strays & Waifs gives a deeper and more sinister element to that usually plucky community of coast dwellers. I should point out that while Mandy Hager is a warm and generous person herself, this is not ‘cosy crime’. Her signature themes are here in this story – environmentalism, protest, kindness as a power – but they are up against some pretty confrontational evil.
The books starts, literally, with a landslide and a light touch of the supernatural that is engaging but unexplained. Bella, a writer and activist in the climate change movement, goes out chasing a cat and loses her home to the mud. She’s been hiding, mourning the loss of a much loved brother, and is reluctant to rejoin the world. Luckily she is offered a halfway step, the opportunity to be a live-in helper to her publisher’s aunt on the coast who is getting on and having some trouble with her eyes. They negotiate a home help/lodger type situation that suits them both.
Things get odd when Bella discovers that dear old aunt Freyja believes she has a bunch of dead people with her who talk to her, not only that, but she does sessions talking to the dead for bereaved clients. Bella thinks she’s an opportunistic charlatan who is doing some crafty googling behind the scenes to learn about her clients’ lost loved ones. But then, the fragile Myra turns up (according to Freyja with her dead mother in tow) and things almost get odder – but Myra is immediately whisked away by a domineering husband. You don’t need to be a psychic to feel the tension in that scene.
Bella has her own late brother with her, in the conventional way that someone loved and lost does remain, but she stays skeptical with Freyja and her claims of messages from the spirits, despite some spooky coincidences. It’s not until Myra returns from the other side that things dramatically kick off. Bella has to make the choice to have faith in Freyja and go along with the weirdness, or turn her back on what looks like an unravelling series of horrible crimes.
Now we step up to full on, dramatic crime fiction. And as I said, these are not cosy crimes. Also hard to explain to the police, what with the help of ghosts and all.
Bella and Freyja are an odd pair, but good for each other. Bella opens up to Freyja’s possibilities and learns to think about her brother without constant pain. We feel her coming back to the world. So many great detective stories use partnerships to add complexity to characters and Mandy Hager does this really well here, the differences and connections between Bella and Freyja making a team bigger than the sum of the two.
I think there is a second story coming. Watch out Kapiti!
Cristina Sanders' blog 