Joan's picks: 17 Years Later and Unmasking Monsters

17 Years Later by J.P. Pomare - who is of course a New Zealander, although I believe these days he lives in Melbourne. He writes terrific thrillers which are often set here, and this time, a family have been murdered in their beds in Cambridge and their chef convicted and sent to prison. Many years later, the prison psychologist is convinced that he didn’t get a fair trial and an Australian podcaster takes an interest in the case and travels here to research it for her show. The two of them team up to investigate what actually happened, which is where the author really shines. He sent me down several rabbit holes and had me off on the wrong track, with a book that’s full of surprises and thriller twists. 

 Unmasking Monsters by David (Chook) Henwood. The author spent almost 40 years with the New Zealand Police and in the early days was part of a team trying unsuccessfully for some years to hunt down a serial rapist who was terrorising South Auckland. They were instrumental in developing Criminal Profiling which had not been used here before but enabled them finally to catch their man, and it’s been in use ever since, forever changing the way that policing is done in New Zealand. His stories about his time with the force are fascinating – some criminals became friends – and he shows real insight and empathy into the lives of many of the people he came into contact with. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Time to talk books and Joan joins me. Now, good morning, Hello, JP.
Pomiro must be becoming one of our most prolific New
Zealand authors.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yes, I think I'm right in saying that this is
his seventh book.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think it is.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Yeah. So he's a New Zealand guy, New Zealand writer
now living in Melbourne, but he's churned out these terrific
thrillers and this new one is really good. I was
really engaged by it. Sometimes I'll just flick through a
book and read it quite quickly, but this one it
was worth actually taking the time with it. So it's
the story. It's called Seventeen years Later, and it's the

(00:46):
story of a guy called Bill who was the chef
for a wealthy family in Cambridge. It's set in Cambridge
most of it. And this family we've found murdered in
their beds and Bill the chef was convicted of the
crime and sent away. And now seventeen years later, a
woman in Australia who's a globally knowen podcaster has just

(01:08):
won a big award for her podcasts in Australia, and
she's casting around looking for the next thing to sink
her teeth into, and she hears about this case in
New Zealand where there's some suspicion that that Bill didn't
get a fair trial seventeen years ago, and her antennae
I snap up and she comes across to New Zealand
and starts investigating the background and uncovers things that the

(01:29):
police missed at the time, and she teams up with
a guy called t K, who was Bill's psychologist in
prison for the first many years that he was inside,
and TK tried very hard to prove that the guy
was innocent but just was never able to manage it.
But when he teams up with this podcaster and they
really start to look into what happened, it becomes quite enthralling.

(01:51):
And JP Pomari I think is kind of a master
of misdirection because he sends you down. I'm reading it
and I think, yes, now I know who did it,
And then I turned the page, Oh, actually maybe it
was this guy. And then you get to the end
and you find that you knew nothing at all. I
love it.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
That's what you want, isn't it? From a bit of
a CRI's entertaining, It's really good. Has has started writing
changed much over the years Ah the book.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
I wouldn't say that it's changed. I think he's just
got better and better, fantastic.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Last week on the show, we spoke to David Chuck Henwood.
He's released a book called Unmasking Monsters, filled with some
really fascinating stories about his thirty seven years in the police.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yes, and your listeners will have heard that interview and
will know a lot of what I've gleaned from reading
the book. But as a reader coming to it from
the perspective of the book, I can tell you that
it's absolutely fascinating because I remember back in the eighties
when Joseph Thompson was on the loose and nobody knew
who he was, but he was the serial rapist of

(02:51):
South Auckland and people were absolutely terrified and the police tried,
as you would know, to track him down and they
failed until David Henwood and some of his colleagues in
the police force started doing criminal profiling and set up
the country's first cut or profiling unit, where they were
able to observe the behaviors of criminals and start to

(03:11):
join the dots and make connections, and eventually they managed
to get him, and using the same process, of course,
they also managed to get Malcolm Rawer Chuck Henwood or
Dave Henwood. He is a really interesting guy to read
about because it felt to me like real old style policing.
When he talks about his colleagues in the police force.

(03:33):
They've all got nicknames for one another, and it's all
very blokey and very bantery. But he's got this extraordinary
empathy for the people that he came into contact with.
And what I really loved about this book was his
focus on the generational harm that's being done to people
in that community without anything really coming in to make

(03:53):
it better. To the point where actually he was and
he I can't remember if he said this in the interview,
but he had a criminal with whom he interacted a lot,
and they were going to write a book together, yes,
And Dave was going to write one chapter and this
guy was going to write the other about events which
they had in common but were from told from each

(04:13):
of their perspective. So he's a really interesting guy, I think,
and the kind of policeman that you'd really want to
see out there on the beat and working with communities.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Thank you so much. Joing those two books seventeen years
later by JP Pomire and Unmasking Monsters by David Henwood.
We'll took next week.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
See you then.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.