Max Patte’s iconic statue of a naked man overlooking the Wellington Harbour gives Anne Harré’s debut its title. Patte has said that the sculpture, Solace in the Wind, represents “an emotional portrait” of a certain time in his life.

Fittingly it’s where the wiry, damaged protagonist Stella Watson of The Leaning Man goes to think when she returns from London to attend her parent’s 40th wedding anniversary. “Here was a person, an artist, who knew something,” she thinks, “who understood longing, striving, the act of reaching out for something.”

Stella’s bid goodbye to a promising police career in New Zealand, after an affair with a senior colleague ended disastrously, and that OE in London, filming errant husbands in her role as a private investigator and embarking on various desultory love affairs, hasn’t amounted to much.

Despite the love and support of her family, being back in Wellington, at age 33, unsettles her, triggering the “hamsters on their shitty little wheel in her head.” When her best friend falls from a fourth floor balcony soon after informing her that she wants to meet to talk about something, Stella doesn’t believe it’s a case of suicide and embarks on a one-woman investigation that will lead her down some of Wellington’s darkest streets.

In the book’s opening chapter, we meet Mad-Dog, a homeless man who ends up with Teri’s phone having witnessed her fall while he was out dumpster diving. Like the homeless man played by Jamie Foxx in the 2009 movie The Soloist, Mad-Dog is an accomplished classical musician fallen on hard times (he busks Bach on the city streets). Harré writes with particular empathy and skill when describing Mad-Dog and Wellington’s homeless community, that play a pivotal part in this compelling, twist-laden thriller.

Harré has said that she’s a big fan of Paul Thomas’ Tito Ihaka novels about a Māori detective sergeant in Auckland. While The Leaning Man is not a police procedural in the literal sense, Harré shares Thomas’ skill in presenting a strong, page-turning narrative in a vivid and real-world setting. Harré’s Wellington — from the late night adults-only underworld to its worker-bee city streets — is captured in razor-sharp prose.

But, make no mistake, Stella’s the star of the show and her tenacious do-or-die freelance investigation culminates in a breathless finale that puts to bed the notion she held of sleepy old Wellington early in the novel: “This wasn’t London or New York, for God’s sake. Things don’t happen here.”

While there’s much to celebrate, not everything works. The find-the-phone plot seems to exist in a world where phone security codes and cloud accounts are easily accessed. Similarly, having a body wash up at Stella’s feet just as she’s sitting by that titular statue minding her own business, pushes fictional coincidence a step too far but this is a strong and well-executed debut. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we hear of Stella.

Reviewed by Greg Fleming