1–What is the title of your latest release?
CARVED IN BLOOD (book 3 of the Hana Westerman Thriller series)
2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
CARVED IN BLOOD is the third of my Hana Westerman novels, described as the first thriller series about a Māori detective written by a Māori author – that Māori author being me. Spoiler alert (if you haven’t read the first books), at the end of book one Hana quits the police force, traumatized by her biggest and final case – the hunt for New Zealand’s first serial killer. Early in CARVED IN BLOOD, there’s a shooting. The father of her child, her ex-husband Jaye, is gunned down in a bungled liquor store hold-up. As Jaye recuperates, Hana finds herself being drawn back to the career she has left behind. And little by little she starts to suspect, the shooting might not have been a heist-gone-wrong. Jaye might have been deliberately targeted.
3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
As with the other Hana Westerman books, CARVED IN BLOOD is set in Auckland, the biggest city in New Zealand, with a population about the size of Philadelphia. It’s where I live, and my books are a bit of a love letter to this place. For readers who don’t know Auckland, it’s a stunning city, beautiful harbors, inner city beaches, rooftop bars, amazing food. But it’s also built on a live volcanic field. We’re surrounded by volcanoes, 50 of the things, and you are always aware that deep down below the sidewalks, there’s the constant movement of tectonic plates, ancient seismic currents bubbling, readying to erupt. It’s an eerie landscape to set a crime thriller series…
4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Absolutely. Hana Westerman is a collage of aspects of many strong extraordinary women in my world; aunties, sisters, my two daughters, my girlfriend, my mother (my mum’s maiden name is Westerman). Hana is driven, and more than a little obsessive – a brilliant, instinctive investigator. I think we’d get on really well, but at the same time knowing her as I do I feel she’s as intense as I am, so we might only be able to see each other in small doses!
5–What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Tenacious. Intuitive. Hyper-focussed.
6–What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned (again) how much I love my job! CARVED IN BLOOD got under my skin and didn’t let up. I wrote ten hours a day, day in and day out, no weekends, the book wouldn’t let me go. What was especially interesting to me was a particularly dark character I introduce in this book. This is the most troubled, disturbing character I’ve ever written, and it was completely all-consuming – and more than a little scary – to get under the character’s skin.
7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Before I ever open my laptop and start typing, for any given book I spend a very long time working on structure. I will literally devote months to working with cards and post-its, sticking them to the wall, working and reworking sequences and chapters, repositioning them, ripping up the cards and restructuring the sequences, drawing lines between them. My office ends up looking a bit like those movie scenes where the detective opens the door to the serial killer’s lair! Then when I get to the actual hands-on-keyboard writing, it’s fast. Because I know by then exactly what each chapter is going to be, how it connects to the one before or the one after, I can start pretty much anywhere in the book. I think with CARVED IN BLOOD the first chapter I wrote was Chapter 25, because I was so excited about writing that one! With this way of working, a huge amount of my editing happens before I ever get to writing.
8–What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Anything with gochujang! I have a Korean character in the Hana Westerman books, an ex-detective, he’s a slow-burn love interest for Hana. I’ve written him because I’ve got some dear Korean filmmaker friends who I love very much; Seoul is one of the most exciting cities I know. Mainly I think I created this character because then I get to go to some of the many great Korean restaurants we have in Auckland, and it’s tax-deductible research. At least that’s what I tell my accountant.
9–Describe your writing space/office!
For anyone who aspires to be a fulltime author, here’s a secret: writing is equal parts creativity, perseverance, and ergonomics. I’ve been a professional writer for going on three decades and my body would have failed me long ago if I didn’t have a standing desk. I write at my standing desk, I have a wobbleboard underneath me, so I am constantly subtly moving and repositioning the alignment of my knees, hips and spine. My walls are covered in annotated cards and post-its. Describing it objectively like that, I realize it must be a truly odd thing to be a fly on my wall, watching this stuff.
10–Who is an author you admire?
Truman Capote. He was maybe not the nicest, or most humane person. Which is perhaps being generous; from the accounts I’ve read of him from his contemporaries, I really wouldn’t want to be trapped in the same car as Truman on a cross-country drive. But his writing is so deeply insightful about the human condition. His prose is extraordinary, and deeply filmic. Alfred Hitchcock said that when he reads a novel, he’s not reading words, he’s seeing images projected on a screen inside his head. I feel that way with Capote’s books, and it’s an approach to the craft of writing that I’ve always embraced.
11–Is there a book that changed your life?
When I was 10 years old, my big brother Bruce was away from home doing Psychology at university. In the holidays after his first year, he brought home one of his books – The Clinical Textbook of Abnormal Psychology. I have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to let a naïve ten-year-old kid from smalltown New Zealand read this deeply disturbing book! But I devoured it, cover to cover. The Clinical Textbook of Abnormal Psychology is pretty much how it sounds – it’s a series of astonishing and scary peepholes into the dark corners of the human mind. When Bruce went back to university, I hid the book so he couldn’t take it with him. After that I never went back to more age-appropriate reading material like Mad magazine or Archie comics. In a bit of a twist, in the backstory of the scariest character in CARVED IN BLOOD, as a student they discover The Clinical Textbook of Abnormal Psychology in the local library and steal it!
12–Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
My “call” probably wasn’t the usual writer’s experience. I’d written the first draft of the manuscript of Better the Blood, the first book in the Hana Westerman series. I sent the manuscript to a friend of mine, Craig Sisterson, who is a New Zealander living in London. He’s the godfather of New Zealand crime (in a literary sense) – he runs the Ngaio Marsh Awards, our crime writing awards, and he’s a huge cheerleader for every New Zealand crime writer. I sent the manuscript to Craig, just to get his opinion, because he’s read more crime than anyone I know. It all went very quiet. I figured he mustn’t have enjoyed it very much, and he was too polite to say (as a nationality, we Kiwis are even politer than Canadians, if that is possible). A month or so later, Craig came back and said Simon & Schuster UK had made me an offer. It was a bit of a jaw-dropping moment. I’d never even asked Craig to act as my agent, and he quietly goes off and makes a call to the right person and gets me a four-book deal! A few weeks later, the wonderful Grove Atlantic came onboard as the US publisher, and in a couple of months my world had completely changed.
13–What’s your favorite genre to read?
Crime: in terms of everything I consume, books, TV series, films, podcasts. There’s something about the through-the-roof stakes, of course, and the experience of crime storytelling – adrenaline-pumping, pedal-to-the-metal pacing. But more than that, crime is so universally consumed because crime stories are an amazing way to grab a reader by the scruff and not let them go; but at the same time, crime writing is so often so engaged with issues of the time. For me, great crime writing is like a Trojan Horse. There’s the thriller story. Then there’s the social and cultural issues explored underneath, hidden in the belly of the horse.
That said: if ‘Miranda July’ is a genre (she totally is!) that’s an equal first favorite.
14–What’s your favorite movie?
Bridesmaids. Immediately contradicting everything I said in the previous answer, it’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant writing. Did I mention it was brilliant? Perfect three-act structure, clear and perfectly defined character motivations. I teach screenwriting, and in my first classes I tell students not to buy any of the expensive screenwriting textbooks. Just find Bridesmaids, watch it ten times, and absorb by osmosis exactly what brilliant screenwriting looks like.
15–What is your favorite season?
Summer. I’m a long distance open-water swimmer, the nearest beach is a 20-minute walk from my house, I spend all summer in the ocean. In CARVED IN BLOOD, my detective and her love interest bond during a big ocean swim. Apparently open-water swimming is good for the cardiovascular system, as well as for romance.
16–How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
I’ve had at least a dozen birthdays away from home, in some far-flung part of the world or other. It’s happening again this year – I’m going to be in Quebec, after the Vancouver and Toronto Writers Festivals. Twice, I’ve actually been flying home from the northern hemisphere, leaving the day before my birthday. When you cross the dateline heading south towards New Zealand, you actually lose a day–on those two trips, the day I lost was my actual birthday. So those two birthdays disappeared, like a vapor trail, dissolved into the skies.
17–What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I’m completely obsessed with Ethel Cain. She’s not any of those things (tv show/movie/book/podcast)- but Ethel is everything! I listen to her continuously, loud, this thing has been going on for coming up to six months now. I swear my neighbors must be putting out a contract on me. Her voice is a powerhouse, her arrangements and orchestrations so lush and spinal-fluid-affecting, her lyrics so tough and complex and confronting. But she herself seems to be tough as granite and fragile as tissue paper, all at the same time. Doing it for Dale (if you get the reference, bless you!).
18–What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Korean (see above). Kind of like Ethel Cain – Korean flavors are robust and a full-on confrontation with the tastebuds, but at the same time delicate as a painting made of butterfly wings.
19–What do you do when you have free time?
My family is everything. My girlfriend Jane is an artist and a writer and one of the world’s best costume designers. Our three kids are all artists and extraordinary human beings. Our youngest, Matariki, just had her first book published at the age of 22, beating me by several decades. I’ve never been happier to lose a contest! I have a very clear idea of Heaven: sitting on the beach near our house with my family and our dog, eating fish tacos from the fish and chip shop by the beach, watching the sun go down. Over summer, this idea of Heaven becomes actual at least once a week.
20–What can readers expect from you next?
I’m writing a standalone crime thriller set in Sydney (my home away from home). I think the book has a shot at being incredibly cool, and deeply unexpected. A young female cop shoots someone in a life and death confrontation, and in the aftermath the physical world smashes headlong into the metaphysical world – leaving her lost and untethered, emotionally. And lost and untethered, in time. It’s a bit Vonnegut, a bit Cormac McCarthy, and if I deliver a manuscript a third as good as either of those heroes, then I’m going to be popping champagne.
CARVED IN BLOOD by Michael Bennett
Hana Westerman #3
The stunning new Hana Westerman thriller from the award-winning author of BETTER THE BLOOD
From the Barry Award nominee and Ngaio Marsh Award winner of Better the Blood, a new thriller bringing danger ever closer to Hana Westerman
When Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton stops at an Auckland liquor store for a bottle of champagne, it is supposed to be celebratory: his daughter Addison has just gotten engaged. Instead, he is suddenly gunned down at the register by a balaclava-clad assailant in what appears at first to be a random act. The getaway car is quickly recovered, containing the cell phone of a young Māori man, Toa Davis, who is immediately the object of an all-out police search.
Jaye’s ex-wife, former Māori detective Hana Westerman, asks in on the investigation. Her instincts suggest that the vehicle was meant to be found, and that Jaye had been targeted. The gun used in the assault is distinctive, and she learns that a local gang leader, Erwin Rendall—who had threatened Hana in the past—owns such a weapon. After Davis turns up dead, the hunt for Rendall is on. When he slips through the dragnet and escapes the country, and in the wake of Jaye’s death, Hana decides to rejoin the force, acknowledging that she now has unfinished business.
Skillfully plotted, inviting readers ever further into the appreciation of Māori culture, and with vibrant characters determined to overcome tragedy with resolve, Carved in Blood takes Michael Bennett’s highly-praised series to new heights.
Thriller Police Procedural | Thriller Crime [Grove/Atlantic, Inc., On Sale: July 15, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9780802164544 / eISBN: 9780802164551]
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About Michael Bennett
MICHAEL BENNETT (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and author whose films have been selections at major festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, and New York. He is the author of the crime novels Better the Blood and Return to Blood, the nonfiction book In Dark Places, and the young adult graphic novel Helen and the Go-Go Ninjas, which was a finalist for the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards. He lives in Auckland.
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