Nerdette Book Club: Michael Bennett on ‘Better the Blood’

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

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4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our April book club pick is ‘Better the Blood’ by Michael Bennett. It is both a page-turning detective novel and a deep exploration of the lasting scars of colonialism. Hana Westerman, a Māori detective in Auckland, New Zealand, discovers that a series of murders are connected to the execution of a Māori chief by British colonial soldiers more than 150 years earlier. In pursuing the serial killer, Hana must confront her loyalties to both the police and her roots. In this spoiler-free interview, we talk to Michael Bennett about his experience as the first Māori author to write a thriller about a Māori detective. We will be back on the last Tuesday of the month to discuss the book, spoilers and all, and you can participate! Record a voice memo with your thoughts on the book and email the file to NerdettePodcast at gmail. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:38.9	From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat Book Club.
0:42.5	It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by.
0:47.9	It is April, and our pick this month is Michael Bennett's detective mystery novel Better the Blood.
0:51.5	It's about Hannah Westerman, a Maori detective in New Zealand.
0:53.6	Her personal life is tumultuous.
0:55.4	The father of her teenage daughter is her ex and is also her boss, but she is very good at her job. And when mysterious and interconnected
1:01.6	murders start happening, she is determined to get to the bottom of it. This is also a story about
1:06.4	colonialism and the irreconcilable nature of history. That's all I'm going to say for now, since this is a spoiler-free discussion. Michael, welcome to Nerdat. I'm so honored and humbled to be here. Oh, I'm honored and humbled that you took the time, so thank you so much. So I gave some like very fleeting brushstrokes in terms of what this book is about.
1:28.4	But can you tell us a little bit more about kind of the main plot points that we're working
1:31.6	with in this one, again, in a spoiler-free fashion?
1:34.8	It's the story of a Maori detective, a senior Maori female detective called Hannah Westerman
1:40.5	who discovers that a couple of killings that have happened are connected in ways
1:48.1	that have never been put together before.
1:50.8	What she discovers is that in the 19th century during the brutal colonisation of New Zealand
1:56.5	by the British, by the English, a Māori chief was wrongfully executed on one of the mountains
2:05.1	in central Auckland. He was executed by a troop of six British soldiers. And what Hanna discovers
	...

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