The Brokenwood Mysteries: "A Real Page-Turner" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, aired November 19, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 19) my husband Charles and I watched yet another episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that very interesting crime show both made and set in New Zealand dealing with the much-married detective inspector Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea); his current police partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland); an associate detective with his squad, Sam Breen (the very handsome Nic Simpson); and a Maori friend of theirs, Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor), who’s a wine grower and lingers around most of the episodes, though in this one he’s actually a witness that can disprove one of the suspect’s alibi. This one was called “A Real Page-Turner” and deals with successful mystery writer Jack Rudd (Matt Whelan, who vividly captures both the character’s sex appeal and his utter egomaniac self-centeredness). He comes to the tiny New Zealand town of Brokenwood to read at a small bookstore called “Slim Volume” owned by Maxine (Anna Baird), who’s been carrying on an online flirtation with him which she hopes to consummate with him as part of her paying him for the appearance. Also on his list of comps is a free, almost palatial Air B’n’B rental with a swimming pool on the property. It seems that Maxine isn’t the only local woman Jack is involved with; he also invites someone else – Mike Shepherd’s ex Petra Conway (Lucy Wigmore) – to trick with him, including a hot scene in that elongated rectangular pool. Jack came from the area originally and was a creative writing student of K. L. Carnaby (John Callen), a local professor whose own novels are psychologically complex and sell only a fraction of what Rudd’s do. Carnaby also had another student, Hamish, whom he regarded as a much better novelist; Hamish and Rudd were friends and Hamish actually introduced Rudd to a potential publisher for both writers, but once they read Rudd’s book they decided to publish it instead of Hamish’s. Hamish also teaches creative writing at the local high school and has a star pupil, 16-year-old Lindy (Lily Powell), whom he’s interested in mentoring. We get distinct hints that he’s interested in being more than just her mentor, especially when we learn that Hamish was fired from a previous teaching job for dating a student. Hamish protested that the woman was 18 and he didn’t start their affair until after she finished his class, but the scandal was strong enough to force him to resign and look for another teaching job elsewhere.

The mystery portion kicks off when Jack Rudd is cornered on a staircase at the Slim Volume and stabbed to death during a break from his book event at which he was reading from his latest thriller, not coincidentally called Knife in the Back. The writers of “A Real Page-Turner” (Rachel Lang, story; Fiona Samuel, script) followed some of the oldest rules of writing whodunits, including making the murder victim such an asshole he’s left behind a number of people who all hate him enough to be capable of murdering him. Among them are Professor Carnaby, who claims Rudd stole the plot of his first (highly successful, and about to become a movie – I’ve written in these pages before that the real money for a commercial author comes in selling the movie rights, which is why so many modern entertainment novels come off as screenplays in prose) novel from a plot he’d outlined in class as an exercise; Maxine, who wanted a commitment from Jack; his alternate girlfriend; Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda), Shepherd’s medical examiner, who sent Jack an analysis of what was wrong with the forensic science in his latest manuscript and then saw her notes incorporated verbatim into the final published version of the book; Rev. Lucas Greene (Roy Ward), who gave Rudd his only copy of a handwritten novel of his own and asked the famous author for advice (and overheard Rudd reading some of it to Petra in the pool and both of them laughing at how bad it was), and who it’s also hinted had a Gay crush on Rudd; and Lindy’s mother, who worked as a barista at an on-campus coffeehouse and had had an affair with Rudd when Rudd and Hamish were both students at the local college.

It turns out that Lindy is actually Rudd’s daughter – Lindy’s mom stole his shaver from his rental house so she could have his hairs tested for DNA and definitively establish Lindy’s parentage – but Rudd left her alone to raise the child as a single mother and never gave her any child-support money or even any acknowledgement that the child was his. When Lindy showed up at Rudd’s event to get her book signed, he curtly dismissed her and wrote nothing on the book but his name. Both Lindy and her mother are suspected of Rudd’s murder, but the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Hamish, who confronted Rudd in the bookstore and demanded that he acknowledge Lindy as his daughter and help her financially. Rudd, of course, refused to do anything of the sort, so Hamish stabbed him on the staircase with a knife owned by bookstore owner Maxine (and because she owned the murder weapon the cops suspected her for a while) and killed him, knowing that this meant Lindy, as his next of kin, would inherit his estate, including the money he could have made from the film version of his novel. While I’m sorry that as The Brokenwood Mysteries evolved the characters, Shepherd in particular, lost some of their “edginess” (Shepherd drives a marginally nicer car these days and he doesn’t play local New Zealand country music as incessantly as he did before in the show’s first year or two – who knew there was an extensive local country-music scene in New Zealand) – and the show has a quite nice ending gimmick in which Shepherd goes to the wedding of his ex Petra and her current fiancé, who comes across like an old guy who’s trying to provide her with an affluent and super-cool lifestyle. I’ve basically liked The Brokenwood Mysteries, and this was one of the better episodes I’ve seen, with enough suspects (with enough interesting motives) that the ending was genuinely suspenseful and also legitimately surprising.