It's just been brought to my attention that I haven't offered non-subscribers the chance to pre-order the new book on the Crewe murders being released by us next month.
Accordingly, here's the gist of the email that went out to our customer database today:
LAST CHANCE TO PRE-ORDER (free shipping, and beat the GST increase)
The book not only clears Arthur Allan Thomas, it also clears Len Demler. So who committed the crimes? Find out the explosive details as the first significant new evidence in 40 years, implicating new suspects, emerges.
This will be the most-talked-about book of 2010. You can also reserve a copy at your nearest bookstore if you prefer.
The order form is attached as a PDF Download ThomasOrderform and the direct website link is below, so rather than repeat what we've said already, here's how the story begins...
The blades slice across the glass, but they don't cut the blizzard of raindrops exploding ahead of me like golden starbursts in the oncoming headlights. An elderly schoolbus, young faces peering from behind steamy panes, rumbles past and I wonder how many of these Pukekawa schoolkids are aware that – 40 years ago this particular June day – a darkness fell on their town whose shadows linger still. It's a fair bet, I ponder as I throw the Toyota around another tight corner, that the answer to my silent question is 'none'.
The roiling stormclouds from the June frontal system battering the North Island retreat into the rear-view mirror as the car penetrates deeper into this north Waikato heartland and weaves through an interruption of late afternoon winter sunlight, dappling through dank roadside swamps and fens whose now azure pools are starkly punctuated by the reflections of lush cabbage trees and the wispy branches of the occasional native pine. Fantails, regarded in Maori legend as harbingers of death, flitter and dip above the waters, diving into clouds of midges and emerging satiated.
The marshlands are still giving up their 20th century ghosts to this 21st century driver; decaying and abandoned farm sheds and homesteads dot the high ground, their ancient, scarred and often bare timbers now exposed to both the elements and the ethereal kiss of sunset.
It seems an oddly haunting moodsetter as the 70km/h speed-limit sign marking the edge of town flashes past. Ahead on the horizon another Everest-sized wall of tempestuous grey is rushing in from the Tasman sea and, behind, the equally squally system I've just confronted. Yet here, in the middle, the tiny hamlet of Pukekawa pauses to draw breath in the stillness that hides between thunder-bands, and a rainbow crests over the village school.
"You're researching the Crewe murders?", the pump attendant ventures, semi-rhetorically, after discovering my interest in his village, but betraying no hint that he knows the significance of the date. I watch as the fuel gauge ticks over at speed, and momentarily marvel that the $106 I've just chalked up for a tank of gas would have filled up seven cars back on June 22, 1970.
"The community's still divided, even now," the attendant adds, clanging the pump handle back into its holster. "It's interesting to watch, see who won't talk to whom, who won't eat in the same room as someone else."
Forty years, and the events of a bitter winter afternoon still ricochet through time finding targets in the souls of villagers – some of whom weren't even born when the shots were fired. Yet, just as the countryside surrounding it, Pukekawa has changed little in that time. It still has one church, one shop, one hall, and the little, 100-pupil, settlement school established back in 1895 - behind whose wrought iron gates a boy named Arthur Thomas and a younger Jeanette Demler eventually shared a classroom together.
On June 22, 1970, however, those schoolyard connections were not at the forefront of anyone's mind. Instead, just as the clock ticked one in the afternoon, Jeanette's father Len was swinging open the creaky gate leading to the little brick and tile farmhouse Jeanette shared with her husband of four years, Harvey Crewe. Within the hour of that discovery, police cars would swoop and detectives be crawling across the property, as Pukekawa residents came to realise something unspeakable had happened to two of their own...
Click the link below for ordering details
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/newshop/contents/en-us/d21.html#p123
THE BOOK IS UNDER EMBARGO BECAUSE OF WHAT IT CONTAINS, AND IS BEING RELEASED ON SEPTEMBER 27
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