Desperate for reward money – and to rescue his marriage – an embattled sheriff takes incalculable risks to find a missing boy. An edge-of-your-seat, twisted and twisty thriller from New Zealand's King of Crime.
Acacia Pines, USA. Sheriff Logan's life is falling apart – his ...Read more
Paul Cleave is an absolute master of the art of the expected unexpected, especially when Theodore Tate pops up. On the expected front you know that things are going to get messy weird, and you know that Tate is going to go out of his way to try to do right by victims, regardless of the...Read more
A young man wakes from a coma to find himself targeted by the men who killed his parents, while someone is impersonating a notorious New Zealand serial killer … the latest chilling, nerve-shredding, twisty thriller from the author of The Quiet People…
James Garrett was critically...Read more
Cameron and Lisa Murdoch are successful crime writers. They have been on the promotional circuit, joking that no one knows how to get away with crime like they do. After all, they write about it for a living.
So when their seven-year-old son Zach goes missing, the police and the...Read more
Back when I first discovered Paul Cleave's books and the Theodore Tate series in particular, I did wonder if he really liked frightening the living daylights out of his readers. I'm not talking horror or anything here, but the creepy, persistent sense of terror that invades those books has...Read more
'They come for me as I sleep. Their pale faces stare at me, their soft voices tell me to wake, to wake. They come to remind me of the night, to remind me of what I have done.'Only Charlie doesn't know what he has done. His shorts are covered in blood, there's a bump on his forehead and on...Read more
Christchurch based author Paul Cleave has had a way of creating scenarios, and settings for his novels that have kept this reader awake and mildly anxious for a long time now. WHATEVER IT TAKES is a bit of a departure from his previous style, set in the USA, eschewing a lot of the slight...Read more
In the latest thriller by the Edgar-nominated author of Joe Victim, someone is helping rape victims exact revenge on their attackers, prompting an edge-of-your-seat, cat-and-mouse chase between old friends, detectives Theodore Tate and Carl Schroder.
Carl Schroder and Theodore...Read more
Edward Hunter is a family man with a beautiful wife and daughter, a great job, a bright future, and a very dark past. Edward's father is a man of blood. He's been in jail for twenty years and he's never coming out. Edward has struggled his entire life to put that all behind him, but it's...Read more
When seven-year-old Alyssa is kidnapped, Deputy Noah Harper decides he will do what it takes to find her – but that means crossing lines he can never come back from. Finding the girl safe, isn’t enough to stop Noah from losing his job, his wife, and from being kicked out of Acacia Pines. He...Read more
A chilling case of unsolved murders and mistaken identities unravels when a lake in a Christchurch cemetery releases its grip on the murky past in this exciting crime thriller from the internationally bestselling author of The Laughterhouse .
Cemetery Lake begins in a cold and...Read more
In the latest thriller by the Edgar-nominated author of Joe Victim, someone is helping rape victims exact revenge on their attackers, prompting an edge-of-your-seat, cat-and-mouse chase between old friends, detectives Theodore Tate and Carl Schroder.
Carl Schroder and Theodore...Read more
Meet Joe. He's a nice guy out to catch a copycat killer. The one copying him.
Joe is in control of everything in his simple life, including both his day job at the police department and his 'night work'. He remembers to feed his fish twice a day and visit his mother at least once...Read more
The Cleaner is Christchurch, New Zealand based Paul Cleave's debut novel. Set in Christchurch where at one point Joe, the central character, muses that the biggest crime in Christchurch City - apart from the fashion and the Old English Architecture, glue-sniffing, too much greenery, bad...Read more
THE KILLING HOUR is Cleave's second book - a totally new direction from THE CLEANER, his first book released (at least in Australia) last year.
And what a direction it takes. Our "hero" Charlie doesn't know what he's done. His clothes are covered in blood, there is a bump on...Read more
For reasons that escape me, Paul Cleave doesn't seem to have the profile, or the world-wide awareness that he absolutely and utterly deserves. He's one of those authors that consistently turns out something different, something that is designed to challenge the reader, and always something...Read more
The 4th Theodore Tate novel, FIVE MINUTES ALONE sees author Paul Cleave continuing to pull together connections from many of his previous novels - this series and the Christchurch Carver books. Must admit some of these connections, and the continuation in these books fascinate this reader....Read more
In 2006 THE CLEANER was released and the opportunity to review it provided this reader with a life-long obsession with Paul Cleave's books (and a sneaking suspicion he was trying to scare me half to death!)
In my review at that time...Read more
Are you allowed to do one word reviews?
In which case it's ... wow.
If we're not allowed could I just add terrific, twisty, tricky, tantalising, taut and maybe tremendous.
It's really embarrassing that sometimes it can take an age to get...Read more
Christchurch private investigator Theodore Tate is attending the exhumation of a man who died two years before. Suddenly bubbles appear on the surface of the small lake in the middle of the cemetery, and several bodies slowly rise to the surface.
When the exhumed coffin is...Read more
CEMETERY LAKE is the third book by Paul Cleave, THE CLEANER and THE KILLING HOUR being the first two. None of these books are connected, so you can pick them up in any order, although, being lucky enough to read them in order, you can see a certain style developing in the writing....Read more
It always amazes me, how Paul Cleave can start out with a scenario that somehow seems quite normal and "expected" and then make it all go very very good weird, and you don't even notice that it's happening until you finish the book, turn all the lights back on the in house and take a big...Read more
People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn’t make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn’t make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he’s asked by Green’s father to help find Emma. After...Read more
Joshua is convinced there is a family curse. It's taken away his biological parents, robbed him of his eyesight, and is the reason his father Logan, the detective who raised him, is killed while investigating the homicide of a young woman. The suspect, Simon Bowers, is killed by Logan's...Read more
Sometimes reality can really get in the way of a good story.
Joe Middleton’s story is He doesn’t remember killing anyone, so there’ s no way a jury can convict him of serial murder. He calls himself Joe Victim, trying, as he awaits trial, to convince the psychiatrists that he...Read more
Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene - ten year-old Jessica Cole found dead in 'the Laughterhouse,' an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the 'S' painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it?
Fifteen years later, a new killer arrives...Read more