Former Burns Fellow Paddy Richardson's reputation as a crime writer will receive a further boost with her latest, Traces of Red.
Set in the lower North Island, its theme is justice, achieved or denied by police anxious for a conviction, particularly in murder cases that attract widespread media attention.
Richardson cites the Thomas, Dougherty and Bain trials in her novel. The latter case seems to haunt this story of a slaughtered family and the conviction and imprisonment of the one surviving male member, Connor Bligh.
Bligh's case is taken up by a crusading TV journalist, Rebecca Thorne, not at first for humanitarian reasons but in the hope of rebuilding her fading career on the back of it.
Despite warnings from her family, friends and colleagues, Thorne becomes increasingly ardent in her support for Bligh and the hope of securing a retrial and release from Rimutaka on bail.
This is very much a New Zealand novel, exploring as it does the mysteries of life in small towns and the supposed glamour of the big city.
The ending seems rather anticlimactic but that, perhaps, is testimony to the strength of the story.
• Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
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