Inside the Black Horse

In his debut novel, Inside the Black Horse (2015), New Zealand author Ray Berard draws on his experiences as a supervisor of TAB, New Zealand’s nationwide betting agency that often has outlets in neighborhood pubs, depicting the seedy underbelly of small town life. Set in Rotorua, a small community on North Island, home to a Maori village, the novel combines the genres of thriller, detective fiction, and romance to tell the story of an accidentally violent robbery that entangles a meth-dealing drug gang and a gambling corporation in ever-escalating fallout.

The Black Horse Bar and Casino in Rotorua, New Zealand, is a “local”—a New Zealand term for a pub that is almost a community center for a neighborhood. All sorts of people are Black Horse regulars: everyone from blue-collar workers to businessmen climbing the corporate ladder. Everyone comes there to drink, smoke, socialize, and gamble. Gambling at the Black Horse consists of “pokies,” or slot machines, and TAB, or sports betting.

When the novel opens, Toni Bourke has been running the Black Horse for the past few months, while still reeling from the unexpected death of her husband several months ago. The sudden widowhood has left the young Maori woman a single mother scrambling to make ends meet at the pub while taking care of her young children.



One night, Pio Morgan, a young Maori man steels himself outside the Black Horse for what he believes is his only choice—robbing the pub to pay off a debt he incurred after a marijuana grower swindled him. Pio has grown up surrounded by gangs, street violence, and a general sense of desperation and hopelessness. As he considers his move, he thinks about the Maori elders he knows and their attempts to pass on the values and ideals of their culture to his generation.

Pio’s stickup is a terrible mess. Nervous, not naturally violent, and in a panic, he steals $60,000 from the till. Then, in an offhand decision, Pio takes a satchel containing $500,000 worth of meth from a currier there to hand it off to a contact for a big drug gang in Auckland, New Zealand’s capital. The satchel’s bearer fights back, and Pio accidentally shoots the man in the head before getting away.

Over the next few days, all hell breaks loose in the small town.



Unbeknownst to Toni, an Auckland gambling company executive Peter Butterworth has just discovered that he made a terrible mistake—he forgot to collect the Black Horse’s casino winnings the previous week. For him, the robbery comes at the perfect time to save his job. He declares that the pub actually owes his company $115,000 and accuses Toni of being in on the robbery. To try to dig up any evidence that might pin the blame on Toni, Peter hires Brian Duncan to investigate.

Brian, whose career as an undercover cop in the US led him to become a private investigator in New Zealand, expects to find a sleepy, quiet village and is stunned that Rotorua is closer to the gang turf in Detroit. As he tries to get to the bottom of what happened, Brian finds himself developing romantic feelings towards Toni.

Meanwhile, the missing bag of meth stirs the ire of two ferocious neighborhood gangs, each of whom makes a play for finding the drugs and the robber. One of the gangs is headed by Kingi, Pio’s older brother, who wants to find Pio before the other gang gets their hands on him. Kingi is a man with a growing addiction to P, erratically unpredictable mood swings, and a dangerous temper that can only be soothed by his uncomplicated, unconditional love for his dog. Paranoia and distrust of his fellow gang members plague Kingi’s drug-addled mind. One of his lieutenants is Henry, an aging gangster whose body is starting to fall apart in hard to cope with ways. Henry is increasingly convinced that only prison will get him the healthcare he needs—and a desire to go to prison makes Henry a weak point in Kingi’s operation.



The story proceeds at a fast pace, with plenty of violence and plot twists, all the while exploring the ways that the beautiful natural backdrop of Lake Rotorua is meaningless to a community without expectations of a future or hope of getting out of the cycle of violence. Critics praise Berard’s choice to focus on the Maori in particular, highlighting the differences between the older generation’s attempts to keep traditions alive and the younger generation’s descent into drug addiction and rootlessness. As Toni tries her best to keep her family together, she can’t help but project into her children’s future the lives she sees people like Pio leading. Praised for being an assured first novel, Inside the Black Horse won the 2016 Ngaio Marsh Debut Novel Award, was long listed for the 2017 Dublin Literary Award, and made the finals of the 2016 Ngaio Marsh Crime Thriller of the Year.