Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

I have a confession to make. This is only the second book by Nalini Singh I’ve ever read (the other being an old Harlequin that I remember enjoying over a decade ago!). I know she’s the author of a number of very successful series, including the hugely popular PsyChangeling books – but I just haven’t found the time to pick up any of them (one of these days…). So when I saw that she was branching out into the suspense genre with A Madness of Sunshine, a standalone title set in her homeland of New Zealand, I was intrigued; and seeing that the excellent Saskia Maarleveld had signed on to narrate it just cemented my decision to pick up the book in audio.

Anahera Rawiri returns to her hometown of
Golden Cove on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island eight years after
turning her back on it forever, or so she’d hoped at the time. Having pursued a
glamorous career as a classical pianist, Anahera based herself in London, but
decided to return to NZ following the death of her famous playwright husband,
who – she’d discovered after his death – had not only cheated on her but left
his mistress pregnant. Even though she’d worked hard to get away from Golden
Cove, a small, provincial town that offered no prospects, something has called
Anahera back there, and she decides to make her home in the remote cabin that
she had lived in with her late mother.

Detective Will Gallagher is the town’s
one-man police department. He’s one of the few people in Golden Cove who isn’t from Golden Cove, and even though he’s
been there for over a year, many of the locals still view him as an outsider. A
highly decorated and experienced officer, Will was sent to Golden Cove after a
domestic abuse case he was working went badly wrong, resulting in the deaths of
the woman and child he’d sworn to protect. Unable to simply fire him, his
superiors pretty much put him out to pasture and forgot about him; and now he
mostly spends his time breaking up bar fights, or calming down neighbourhood
disputes. It suits him, for the most part.

But that changes when nineteen-year-old
Miriama Hinewai Tutaia
goes missing after heading out for a run. Miri is beautiful (as we are told
many, many times) and vibrant, with a smile so bright it was as if the sun had
come out; she’s the town’s darling and everybody loves her. She lives with
her aunt, a close friend of Anahera’s late mother, and works at the local café,
which is owned by Anahera’s best friend Josie, so of course Anahera, like
everyone else in town, is eager to join in the search.

Anahera
is guarded and a bit prickly towards Will on their first meeting, and becomes
even moreso when he manages to say the wrong thing at their second. But as the
hours and days pass with no sign of Miriama, and the likelihood of finding her
alive lessens, Will starts to realise that if he’s to make any headway, he
needs the help of someone with knowledge of the townsfolk and the town’s
history, an insider like Anahera, whom people are likely to open up to and not
be suspicious of. But then the unexpected discovery of a set of human remains
at the local rubbish dump blows Will’s investigation wide open; could Miriama’s
disappearance be linked to the murder, fifteen years earlier, of three young
female hikers? As Will and Anahera work together to find out the truth, they
discover layer upon layer of secrets, lies and betrayals, some of them things
that someone is prepared to kill to keep hidden.

A Madness of Sunshine is a character-driven
suspense novel featuring well-drawn characters and an intriguing and well
put-together plot. The pacing is perhaps a little slow for the first
half/two-thirds of the book, but that allows the author plenty of time to flesh
out her characters and explore the complex relationships between them, as well
as to create and build the atmosphere of menace that permeates the small
coastal town. That said however, there’s really nothing new here. We’ve got the ex-big city cop with a troubled past, the damaged widow, the
beautiful victim everyone loved… in fact, the real standouts of the book for me
were the author’s descriptions of the landscape and locations – which painted
wonderful pictures in my mind – the culture and traditions of the area and
people, and her insight into the problems faced by a small, rural community
like the one depicted. There’s a large cast of characters, but many felt
underused; and as we neared the end, it began to seem as though every single
male inhabitant of Golden Cove – except Will – had some horrible, dark secret
that pointed to them as the likely killer; it was one (or six) red-herrings too
many. And I could probably have made a drinking game out of the number of times
we were told how beautiful and vibrant and perfect Miriama was!

I was also a little disappointed by the
ending. The identity of the villain(s) was fairly easy to work out, and it
seemed to me that Will’s major breakthrough happened largely off the page; I prefer
mysteries where I can follow the clues along with the characters and am privy
to their thought processes, so this was a bit of a let-down.

So, I had some issues with the story, but
none at all with Saskia Maarleveld’s narration, which was absolutely superb. (Her
bio indicates she was raised partly in New Zealand, so she was the pretty much
the ideal choice to narrate this book!) In fact, I suspect it was her
performance that got me through some of the slower parts of the audio; her
husky, mellifluous voice is easy on the ear, her pacing is spot on, and she thoroughly
captures the varied personality traits of the characters, differentiating
effectively between all of them. With such a large cast, it’s difficult to
assign every character a different ‘voice’, and there were indeed a couple of
characters who sounded similar, but these tended to be peripheral and didn’t
appear in scenes together. Ms. Maarleveld infuses her entire performance with a
gently lilting New Zealand accent which she tones up or down as required by the
characters, and delivers a wonderfully nuanced and expressive performance all
round.

I enjoyed A Madness of Sunshine in spite of its flaws, but what really made
it for me was the narration, which both papered over some of the cracks in the
storytelling and elevated it to the
next level. I certainly wouldn’t say no to more suspense novels from Ms. Singh
– and if Ms. Maarleveld narrates them, then so much the better!