The Opawa Affair

A novel by Edmund Bohan

August 1879. Christchurch is in the grip of election fever and the excite-
ment generated by the visiting Lowry Opera Company. Then a body is dis-
covered in the Heathcote River…

Enveloped in the intrigue and horror caused by this grisly find is a com-
plex cast of characters, each driven by spectres from the past, sexual desires
or private delusions: the ambitious young opera star Frances Grace, courted
by the Premier Sir George Grey; the great Briani, led once more into the
liaison that has already threatened to blight his career; the beautiful Amelia
Allen, paragon of aristocratic respectability; the mysterious Mrs Fletcher,
madam of an exclusive bordello; and the young boy Henare Greaves, search-
ing for his vanished uncle. Through their midst stalks the austere, enigmatic
police detective Sergeant O’Rorke, ex-Pinkerton man and outsider, who is
driven by his own inflexible moral imperatives. And in the background, like
an implacable chorus, are the unruly mobs of the polling day riots and the
politely cultured leaders of ‘Society’.

The Opawa Affair is a story of obsessions, illusions and hypocrisy. It is
both a Victorian murder-mystery melodrama and a comedy of nineteenth-
century colonial manners, complex in construction and ironical in tone.

EDMUND BOHAN is the author of Edward Stafford: New Zealand’s First
Statesman, shortlisted for the 1995 Montana Book Awards.

Publication: April 1996
RRP $24.95,
200 pages
ISBN 0-908790-61-9

HP
HAZARD PRESS
publishers

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