Two books. Two stories. One extraordinary main character.
Max is a homeless man living on the streets of Auckland, New Zealand.
Let’s be blunt he stinks, he hasn’t had a wash for ages, he hasn’t had a shave or a haircut for even longer. He’s emaciated, covered in sores and has suffered more than one beating as he forages skips and bins for food.
Despite most peoples impression of people like Max they live life by a code. The people who chose to live on the streets look after each other.
Often they have nothing in common except they live rough but they do have friendships and feelings.
Max is an ex cop. He has dropped out of life for a reason. He’s not undercover, he saw his daughter killed, and he was part of a botched investigation that let it happen. Since then he has walked away from life, his job, his wife, his teenage son. Nothing is ever going to drag him back. Until………
Book #1 Faceless
Billy is a young girl, only just 18, she has ended up on the streets and has befriended Max.
Billy is a top graffiti artist ands is well known amongst the youth of Auckland. Her graffiti is art, she doesn’t tag, she creates beautiful paintings on buildings. But art cost money. Spray paint isn’t cheap, and she’s not a shop lifter. To fund her activities she sells her body. She has no pimp so she has no protection, and that leaves her vulnerable.
Bradley is an overworked accountant. Hassled by his bosses to work harder and longer than he already does, a wife who persistently pointing out his work life balance is lacking and that he needs to spend more time with his wife and daughter.
Out of pure frustration he looks for a street prostitute and picks up Billy. Then it all goes wrong. Suddenly panicked, before they have any kind of physical sexual contact he knocks her unconscious and takes her to a void building he owns.
Not knowing how to resolve the problem things deteriorate putting Billy in real danger scared for her life, and physically, but not sexually abused.
Max knows somethings wrong. Billy never stays away from her spot on the streets, close to Max, without telling him where she is going to be.
But how does a very rough, smelly, rough sleeper make people listen to him. Nobody takes the homeless seriously, they are just an inconvenience that the city doesn’t want.
Max reaches out to an old colleague, Meredith, still a serving Detective Sergeant, but will she take him seriously. Billy has only been missing a day. Will she take the concerns of a hobo version of a man she once worked with seriously. And if she takes him seriously will she convince anybody else to listen to him.
What follows is a brilliant story set in a community most stories either ignore or cast as victims. In this case they are part of the investigation with Max acting as a Lone Ranger on the streets.
Will his attempts to find Billy, and build bridges with his past succeed.
Book #2 The Reaper
Max is still on the streets but he’s crashing in a gym most nights.
Somebody is murdering the homeless of Auckland. But Max is having difficulty getting the Police to put the deaths down to anything but natural causes.
Reaching out to Meredith he points out that three deaths in three days, even in a community of rough sleepers the size of the one in the city, is very unusual
Word amongst the homeless is that the Grim Reaper is murdering them. It’s no coincidence that the person who started the rumour of the Reaper, the person who has actually seen him, is one of the people found dead.
Meredith and Max team up and the police eventually treat the deaths as murder.
How do you catch an invisible man who is floating amongst the homeless, picking them off one after another, and why are they doing it. Working out a motive might help to identify the killer, but thats proving difficult.
At the same time a man who Max would rather stay in his past approaches him with a request for help.
He wants to find the person who supplied the drugs to his son that led to him killing himself. He killed himself in front of Max seconds after he slit Max’s daughter throat.
Max needs to dig deep, this is triggering, he’s sort of sorting his life out, will this plunge him back to the depression that saw him at the bottom of the barrel he was in at the beginning of the first book.
These two book are extraordinary, and I read them back to back in a few days.
Max is a fantastic creation by an author I had never heard of before.
Vanda Symon may be my discovery of 2026 and I’m looking forward to diving into her back catalogue.
Faceless: Pages 334. Reaper Pages: 305. Publisher: Orion
