Bush Sick Land

Book excerpt: Finalist, 2020 Wishing Shelf Independent Book Awards 'A superbly crafted novel full of dark humour and irrepressible characters. Highly recommended .' Bush Sick Land is a mystery. The setting is a small New Zealand town at the tail end of the 1960s. After the violent death of his best friend, Constable Colin Coates is drawn into a case involving an old flame and her missing teenage son, a taxidermist timber magnate, a gang of bikers with a penchant for swastikas and French kisses and a CIB detective with a back seat and front brain full of forensic psychology journals. But what does all this have to do with The Bird Woman? And why is the constable's son so frightened? Forget the rose-tinted glasses, this book is a pair of thorn-rimmed spectacles. Gloomy, outrageous and blackly funny, step into the world of Bush Sick Land. bush sickness, n. (NZ) A mysterious degenerative condition affecting livestock of the South Waikato-King Country region. In 1935, the cause was discovered to be the very earth itself; a deficiency of cobalt in the pumice-rich soil of the central volcanic plateau.