When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, Geoff Parkes

WHEN THE DEEP DARK BUSH SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE is the first in the Ryan Bradley series (the second - THE FIRST LAW OF THE BUSH was released on 6/1/2026 prompting me to extract the digit and read this!), set in New Zealand's rugged and remote King Country, around the small town of Nashville. A community made up of people who have been there for generations, relying mostly on agriculture as the main economic driver, it's a quiet place, with the spectre of a series of disappearances of women hanging over it.

Set in 1983, the university summer break sees Ryan Bradley back in town, working long, hard hours as a wool presser, whilst looking to sell his mother's house and make a final break from the town where he feels like an outcast, despite growing up here. He's at university in a major city, studying law, and that alone seems to be enough to make others in the town reject him once again - there's that sense of local boy above his station about all his interactions, particularly the one man who he always thought of as a lifelong childhood friend, not the least because his father had always been the only father figure in Bradley's life - his own seemingly vanished many years before.

Bradley is also haunted by the memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker, and his secret lover, who worked beside him in the shearing shed the summer before, then vanished without trace. When Sanna's sister Emilia arrives from Finland, determined to get answers about her sister's fate, it stirs up not just Bradley's life, but the life of a small town who weren't exactly ignoring the missing female travellers in their area, but had done a pretty good job of sidestepping the issue for a long time now.

The sense of small town tensions in WHEN THE DEEP DARK BUSH... feel spot on, as does the constant questioning and discomfort of somebody like Ryan Bradley. Raised by his mother alone in a small town, he was always a bit "different", as evidenced by his decision to go to university (according to the locals), and the strange hold that the town has on him (he could have just arranged for the sale of the house to be handled locally and then gone off to work a summer job anywhere after all). The attraction he had to Sanna was part sexual, part a collision of two different people. His response to her, and to her disappearance comes across as mostly confusion though - but then confusion is pretty much the way he seems to spend his life. Confused about who he is, where he fits in, where he's going to end up. He's a tricky customer to read about in this novel because in many ways he's a spectator in his own life.

It's interesting that against Bradley's doubts and spectating there are a lot of other male characters in this novel who are flat out horrible people. Manipulative, controlling, downright nasty and violent, there are chips on shoulders that should be visible from space. Stack that up against a determined Emilia, and even a forthright Sanna, and it got more than a bit nausea inducing at points.

Which was probably the whole point of those characters, making this an excellent and uncomfortable opening salvo in a series with a central character that's very different from the normal male go getter characters that are served up on a semi-regular basis. The second book in the series is set 10 years later, in the same small town where Bradley has once again returned, this time to the unexplained death of a local man.