secrets of the lost tomb reign of terror review

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She says she can ‘play the attack like a movie’, and proceeds to do just that an unflinching account of the day her ex-boyfriend Antonie Dixon nearly murdered her. In several of these cases, it’s because the women we could have been listening to are dead, at the hands of a man. And where 69-year-old Cunxiu Tian was sexually violated and murdered by Jaden Stroobant in a horrific attack. Where Ron Van der Plaat sexually abused his daughter Tanjas for many years. It’s also the suburb where Anna Browne murdered Carly Stewart. (I grew up there myself our bookshelf boasted the complete World Encyclopaedia set and Reader’s Digest’s top mysteries). After once remarking that bookshelves were ‘an uncommon sight’ in Te Atatū (Braunias lives in Te Atatū) he was lobbed with photos of bookshelves sent by annoyed locals. He makes no secret of the fact that he’s drawn to boring houses in boring suburbs (‘The murder capital of New Zealand is the suburbs’), and thus can often be found in one, excavating the grimmest of details over a cuppa and a slice. And the magpie ways in which he collects stories echo the bird watcher within.

SECRETS OF THE LOST TOMB REIGN OF TERROR REVIEW HOW TO

Missing Persons might well be peak Braunias, although I’m still rather taken by his 2007 memoir, How to Watch a Bird. It’s a superbly crafted piece on the unravelling of a life. His friends remember him as a ‘fantastic joker.’ But when Braunias contacts Mason’s daughter, Rachel Wise, she reveals another side, ‘an unrelenting story of trauma and unhappiness and grief.’ Mason was nasty in the worst of ways, his reign of terror only ending when he left the family. Then there’s Murray Mason, a hard drinking ex- Herald journalist who died after a lonely fall down a stream in the Auckland Domain. ‘When we’d first walked inside the emplacement, and we were looking around that small, damp tomb, Neil pointed to a coin on the floor. Tiny moment on top of tiny moment slowly pulls you in and leaves you bereft. The chapter on Socksay Chansy gently stitches together the pieces of the person who grew up in Mt Wellington, whose life once held much promise - he had a video-editing business in Berlin he had many people who loved him - but had a troubled side. “The funny thing is I’ve still got - and I can’t delete them - all the dinosaur documentaries I recorded for him on SKY.”’

‘“He’d watch animal programmes for hours,” said Chris. Snippets from their recollections are devastating in the detail. They lived with their loss and bewilderment. On meeting Nigel Peterson’s parents, ‘I had to fight very, very hard not to intrude on their grief and burst into tears. He does understand that it’s not all about him. ‘The usual failings ’ he writes, ‘plus old age, which for so long had felt like a rumour, was busy furnishing my life with intimations of mortality.’ He ‘was a lost soul’ who ‘took a special interest in reporting’ the stories of Socksay Chansy, Nigel Peterson, and Murray Mason. The book developed during a time when Braunias considered himself ‘missing.’ This compilation of 12 cases, most of which first appeared in the New Zealand Herald, is a follow-up of sorts to the author’s 2015 The Scene of the Crime.

Secrets of the lost tomb reign of terror review