Loved this fast moving crime with a sassy heroine

Overkill marked a bold beginning for a new voice, and a new hero, in crime fiction. Former pharmacist and Dunedin-based author Vanda Symon wastes no time, immediately stunning readers with an opening-pages haymaker, as an intruder forces a stay-at-home mother to submit to her own death, in order to save her baby daughter.

Soon after, sole-charge rural policewoman Sam Shepherd finds herself co-ordinating the search for the missing mother, and then investigating the looks-like suicide drowning once the body is found. The case is complicated by stroppy Sam’s clashes with authority, her past connections to the deceased’s husband, and the finger of blame beginning to point her own way. She soon feels like a pariah amongst the salt-of-the-earth citizens of small-town Mataura.

Overkill is an excellent first novel from a talented storyteller. Symon nicely balances action, character and story in a well-drawn rural New Zealand setting, and realistically speckles the book with light-hearted moments and humour throughout. Symon drops Sam right in it (literally in one case), and the reader can’t help but be taken along for the ride, willingly and wonderfully.

Symon builds the book to a satisfying conclusion, weaving throughout real issues relevant to such rural communities, along with the loves, hates, hopes, and fears universal to people anywhere. Highly recommended.