Author(s): Andrew Grant

Fiction

Hawks is a tale of New Zealand's wild south-west, set during the early years of the venison recovery industry. This was a time when the cowboys rode choppers instead of horses and used semi-automatic weapons, not six-guns. They lived, worked and sometimes died in the most rugged and spectacular corner of this country - the vast Fiordland wilderness. Hawks is a fictional tale but the fast action depicted here might very well have happened. It is the story of Gray, an enigmatic young man running from his past and the horrors of the Vietnam war. He returns to New Zealand's southern lands to find himself in a war of a very different kind - a dangerous war for the highest profits, set against some of the most inhospitable country in the world. With the deadly skills he learned in the SAS, Gray becomes the top gun, the man every chopper pilot wants in the shooter's seat on his machine as the competition gets fiercer and men begin to take increasingly desperate risks. Some make mistakes and some die. Others are killed, apparently having made no mistakes at all. Gray's story encompasses life and death as well as love. Unashamedly robust, Hawks tells it like it really was, or could have been, as greed and jealousy and a woman named Mary combine in an explosive finale.