Product Review

"The book that finally identifies the “mystery ketch”. The book that finally cracks the case. Ben Smart. Olivia Hope. Scott Watson. Unmissable. Undeniable. Unprecedented. Unexpected."

FROM THE BACK COVER: It's a murder mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. It even has a Watson. Yet, solving the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope has proved anything but elementary. Some books on the case have argued so strongly for either innocence or guilt that they leave out evidence that is 'inconvenient' to their argument. This isn't one of those books. "Elementary" blows open the Scott Watson case with evidence you've never been told before. Now that Scott Watson has broken his silence, it's time to break the story...

REVIEW by Ross Burns for The Spinoff. [Ross Burns had 35 years of criminal law here and in the UK, prosecuting, among others, the Urewera civil disobedience trial and the Switched on Gardener case, and most recently was involved with the defence of Mark Lundy.]

"...His book breaks down into three main chunks; Scott Watson the psychopath and all-round bad bastard (the things the jury never heard), the “mystery man” and the ketch and whether they existed and finally what really happened.

"His analysis of Watson’s character is detailed and if accepted at face value must cut away a large chunk of the sympathy vote which is so important to a successful innocence campaign. He gives the lie to depictions of Watson as a man who had got into a bit of trouble in his youth but had lived a blameless life in the years leading up to the murders, instead portraying him as violent, explosive when drinking and a sexual predator.

"...Much has been made of the apparent differences between Watson and the mystery man. Wishart is at his strongest in pointing out that they are likely to have been the same man; that one man’s clean-shaven is another’s three-day growth and that describing hair that comes to the collar as long is not necessarily inconsistent. Given the known frailties of identification evidence, he has much to work with and does it well. Likewise in his analysis of whether there was a ketch which police never found, he is convincing in his reasoning that it never existed, and if he is right, and the water taxi driver got it wrong, Watson comes right back into the frame.

"As for the “what really happened” part, by this stage in the book the narrative has become discursive, but Wishart nevertheless draws a number of interesting conclusions from the evidence which help in pinning down the events, all of which underline Watson’s involvement. It’s not the most readable part of the book, but is probably the most needed.It’s important for family members of the dead to understand what happened to their loved one. It helps the grieving process to understand the events over which they had no control.

"...For the families of Ben and Olivia, no book can bring their children back, but it is Ian Wishart’s hope that his will at least help. I hope so too." - TheSpinoff.co.nz