Fallout

New Zealand's leading crime writer, Paul Thomas is back with his fifth Ihaka blockbuster – all four previous books were huge sellers, with Death on Demand winning the Ngaio Marsh award for best crime novel and Old School Tie winning Australia's prestigious Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. Fallout is a fast-paced sequel to Death on Demand, involving three interwoven plots revolving around Tito Ihaka, his boss Superintendent Finbar McGrail and Ihaka's former best friend in the police service, disgraced. For 25 years McGrail has been haunted by the unsolved killing of 17 year old who was murdered at a 1987 election night party, but finally a witness comes forward with a scrap of information which sheds light on one of the many mysteries surrounding the case and prompts McGrail to instruct Ihaka to look into it. Ihaka, meanwhile, is embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. Meanwhile Van Roon is unexpectedly hired by a PR man, acting on behalf of a shadowy tycoon, to investigate a reported sighting of a political powerbroker who vanished without trace in 1987. The three strands weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political manoeuvring and intrigue surrounding New Zealand's confrontation with the USA over its anti-nuclear stance.