The Invisible Band

From across the scenic South Island of New Zealand, a story unfolds that moves local characters into a much wider world. Set in 1980, a band experiments with tuning and frequency, and begins to uncover deeper patterns of influence, control, discord, and the limiting of human potential that stretches back in time. An old climbing buddy returns home with new skills. The band's manager seems to be more than she claims.

The Invisible Band weaves together two parallel worlds: a band of three brothers with a new girl out front, working at a popular nightclub attached to a modelling agency, blissfully unaware of being surrounded by a covert team of highly trained young women running operations, while the minders and watchers of a hidden organisation slowly close in amidst scenic panoramas and musical melodrama.

The early chapters steadily unravel the mystery through down-to-earth characters, lively conversations, escalating action, dry humour, and great music, as tension builds. Why was tuning changed? Why were the energy centres banded? Why is plastic replacing natural fibres? How did humanity come to be constrained by vanity? Sold belts, and told to tighten them in hard times.

The band plays on as action, surveillance, pursuit, confrontation and abduction begin to expose the real perpetrators of misery. A surfing trip turns dangerous. Vehicles are followed. A Catalina flying boat enters the story, and events escalate into something far more physical and immediate.

All the while, the novel carries its deeper thread: that sound, fashion, and the structure of everyday life may be shaped behaviour more than people realise. As the threads converge, the story gathers force, building toward a clear and satisfying conclusion.