New Zealand author JP Pomare returns to home soil for his cold case thriller 17 Years Later. Slightly late to the true-crime-podcaster-as-protagonist party (there are so many of these it is now almost its own crime fiction sub-genre), Pomare centres the narrative around a true crime podcast called Legacy. The podcast host, Sloane Abbott, is only one of three main characters who carry the story.
That story revolves around Māori man Bill Kareama, who is seventeen years into a 25 year prison term for killed the wealthy Primrose family. When prompted to take on the case Sloane immediately focusses on the hasty accusation and trial as a potential miscarriage of justice. And yet, when she starts investigating she finds that everyone believes that Bill committed the crime. That includes psychologist Te Kuru “TK” Phillips who fought for Bill’s release until he too became convinced that Bill was responsible. When Abbott discovers a new piece of evidence, the case once again begins to open up and TK is drawn back in.
While the investigation is happening, Pomare gives readers Bill’s account of the events that led up to the killings. Starting with his return from Australia and being hired as a live in cook for the Primroses. This is Bill’s account so readers are constantly comparing it to the things that Sloane and TK learn in their investigations.
All of this is set up for a final third of the novel which starts with a revelation and continues to pull on the threads that have been carefully laid in the first part of the book. Pomare ramps up the tension with a series of escalating cliffhangers and misdirects before the ultimate revelations.
In returning to New Zealand and focussing on an ultra-rich British family, Pomare is able to dig into perennial, but always relevant, themes of colonialism and racism and the way these have driven miscarriages of justice. The ways in which Bill and other Māori are treated by the Primroses and their peers is no justification for murder but gives a particular slant to the way in which readers see the situation. The crime itself was ‘solved’ quickly by police because it involved a Māori suspect and the courts took a similar approach, drawing assumptions based on the profile of the perpetrator. The use of the podcaster as investigator, while a fairly common device these days, is once again used to explore the phenomenon of true crime particularly: who makes it, who it is for and what they want out of it.
17 Years Later is another meticulously constructed thriller from Pomare. Like a rollercoaster slowly climbing to a peak, he turns the screws slowly in the first two thirds of the book before delivering a double and triple twisted, rug-pulling conclusion. And while some of the cliffhangers are set up and then resolved in similar ways and there are a more than a few unanswered questions left hanging, the ride is fast enough that these issues are unlikely to trouble many readers.
17 Years Later by JP Pomare
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