The Luminaries

A gold-rush mystery set in Hokitika on the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island in 1866, where a newcomer, Walter Moody, stumbles into a secret council of twelve men trying to make sense of a fortune, a dead hermit, a vanished young prospector and a prostitute found half-dead. The boomtown is real and exact: the hotels and shipping offices of Revell Street, the deadly bar at the mouth of the Hokitika River, the gold claims out toward the Arahura, and the gaol above the town.

Walter Moody

Hokitika (Revell Street)

Part 1

Newly arrived to make his fortune, Walter Moody walks into the smoking room of a Hokitika hotel and interrupts a secret meeting of twelve men. Their tangled accounts of a night three weeks earlier draw him, and the reader, into the mystery that the elaborate, star-charted structure of the book slowly resolves.

Part 1

explicit The novel is set in Hokitika, the real gold-rush port on the West Coast of the South Island; Revell Street, its main thoroughfare of hotels and offices, is where much of the action takes place.

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