Same theme, different approach

Two New Zealand novelists take the same theme, revenge when a loved one is killed, but their treatment could not be more different.

BLOOD MEN
Paul Cleave
Black Swan, $36.99

HUNTING BLIND
Paddy Richardson
Penguin, $30

Paul Cleave, in Blood Men, goes for the masculine approach of slash and burn, while in Hunting Blind, Dunedin writer Paddy Richardson opts for more subtle, even feminine, revenge.

One lunchtime, Blood Men hero Edward Hunter meets his wife at a Christchurch bank so they can arrange a mortgage.

But while they are waiting, the bank is robbed and Edward's wife dies.

The police come up with nothing, so Edward - son of a serial killer who is still in jail - resolves to find the culprits and kill them.

Stephanie, in Hunting Blind has also suffered loss.

A trainee psychiatrist working in Dunedin, she was brought up in Wanaka, where her little sister Gemma disappeared from a school picnic seven years earlier.

Stephanie is a high achiever, whose life is as sterile as her small flat.

Then a new patient, a woman who has attempted suicide, reveals that her little sister also vanished years ago and, like Gemma, has never been found.

Struck by the parallel, Stephanie takes leave from her job and begins her own investigation.

Edward, too, is doing his own investigation but unlike Stephanie, he has some seriously useful help in the form of his father, who points him in the right direction.

It is far from an unmixed blessing: Hunter senior is messing with his son's head, telling him that he, too, is destined to be a man of blood.

Edward hears a voice telling him to kill and obeys it, dispatching the half-dozen bank robbers in increasingly bloody ways.

Investigating the crime that killed his wife drags Edward down mentally and physically, but Stephanie's quest for Gemma lifts her.

She begins to form adult relationships with her parents who - like many people who have lost a child - are divorced.

Pivotal to the plot of Hunting Blind is Stephanie's stormy relationship with her mother, Minna.

Edward shows no fear and crashes through the unlikely pages of Blood Men, whose characters overlap with those of earlier Cleave novels (Cemetery Lake, The Killing Hour).

Stephanie, on the other hand, is timid and fearful as she tries to trace the man she believes took her sister.

Hunting Blind, despite its somewhat overwritten final chapter, is the better of the two novels, but Blood Men will certainly enjoy wide readership, given that Cleave now has an impressive overseas distribution network as the market for his type of blood-and-guts tales seems insatiable.

• Gillian Vine is a Dunedin writer.