Kaikōura Rendezvous by Stephen Johnson

Title: Kaikōura Rendezvous

Author: Stephen Johnson

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Clan Destine Press

Published: 1^st October 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 280

Price: $36.95

Synopsis: Melbourne TV journalists Kim Prescott and Jo Trescowthick are on a well-earned holiday, travelling both islands of New Zealand in a motorhome.

But, will they survive a monster storm and a killer on the loose?

Kaikōura Rendezvous is the riveting third book in Stephen Johnson’s Melbourne Spotlight series – which includes Tugga’s Mob and Boxed – and it finds Kim and Jo on a carefree summer adventure with an idyllic itinerary: whale watching in Kaikōura, mud pools in Rotorua, and the stunning Marlborough Sounds. The leisurely road trip will take them from New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, to the tourist mecca of Queenstown in the deep south.

They won’t make it.

TV reporter Kim survived a bullet in the back from a killer but can’t shake the post trauma stress. It triggers violent reactions. For Jo, the trip is more than a holiday; it’s a chance to confront family demons.

They don’t know they’re driving into a brewing tempest. Cyclone Gita is on a serpentine path of destruction through the tropics that will see her smash into New Zealand.

Debt-ridden South Island fisherman Gordie Tulloch is offered the deal of a lifetime. It’s a chance to start again after a spell in prison. Is it legal? He doesn’t care. All he has to do is survive the storm approaching the Shaky Isles.

Gordie’s unaware there’s another threat to his big payday. His every move is under scrutiny by a Heath Michel, whose own secrets are about to spill into public view.

The cyclone, the motorhome, the fisherman and the watcher all face an unexpected rendezvous – in Kaikōura.

~*~

TV journalists from Melbourne Spotlight, Kim and Jo, are off for holiday for two weeks to reset and relax after Kim survived being shot in the back. Jo sees the trip as a way to help Kim work through her trauma, and for Jo, face family demons and secrets that she’s been trying to cope with for the past two years. They’re unaware of the danger they’re headed into: Cyclone Gita, who is snaking her way around the South Pacific towards New Zealand, a fisherman involved in smuggling, and the people involved in the smuggling with ulterior motives that will put everyone in danger. And The fisherman, Gordie, is being watched by Heath Michel – who has his own secrets. And because they’re all headed for Kaikōura, they will all converge in unlikely and unsettling ways.

Stephen Johnson’s story flits between Melbourne, New Zealand, and Fiji as the key characters – Heath, Gordie, Kim, Jo, and Gita are all moving towards a convergence and rendezvous at Kaikōura – and the results won’t be pretty. This is the third in the Melbourne Spotlight series from Clan Destine Press. Having not come across the first two books before, I went into this one not knowing much. Yet it was written in a way that gave you enough to set up the premise and backstory to lead into this one, with references to the first two books. At the same time, it dangled these little bits in front of readers to entice new readers to venture into the previous books. They all have an agenda – some more sinister than others, yet nobody in the story can escape the furious agenda of Mother Nature, and the crimes in the novel unravel as things go on, becoming more dangerous as the story progresses.

Instead of chapters, the novel takes place over a week, and is divided into days, with each day further split between the locations each character visits and the relevant people for each place, which builds the story slowly. At first, this felt a little disjointed, but it soon made sense once the threads started to twist together. I think it helped to build the tension, showing each separate plot moving towards each other throughout the novel. As it did this, secrets that each person had started to come out slowly, adding to the tension and what was to come, as well as the uncertainty of how things would play out as a cyclone bore down on everyone. I quite liked the way Stephen personified the cyclone, making Gita another character in the novel with her own perspective and growth. It added an intriguing aspect as things catapulted towards Kaikōura. The build-up was slow at first, yet in the final days and chapters, things picked up, feeling like things were going to fall apart before they could be resolved –  which made this crime novel work well, as it had a good mix of amateur detectives, or regular people caught up in an awkward situation, the bad guys, someone whose motives were unknown as well as secrets and a look at the impact of destructive weather and the secrets that it can uncover.

Everything in this novel was carefully plotted and sewn together, ensuring that by the end, the story had a conclusion that made sense and could lead into other books.