Straddling old world and new, Mila and the Bone Man explores the corrosive power of guilt, the solace to be found in the natural world, and our capacity to heal as well as hurt.
Set in the forest in northern New Zealand, Mila is a young woman descended from healers. A family...Read more
Poor Little Crick, he is a penniless orphan cast upon the cruel world of 19th Century Kirkshire, with the face – no less – of a pretty girl. Yet he is cunning, he has a fire in his belly, and he has the wiles to become anyone he a swooning lady in a drawing room, a cheeky harlot in a...Read more
John Lacey's lust for power and gold brings him riches and influence beyond his wildest dreams. Only he knows the terrible crime he committed to attain that wealth. Years later, as Lacey ruthlessly presides over the town he has built and named after himself, no one has the courage to...Read more
Jane is a contact tracer. She has to call a lot of people and some of them don’t want to talk. Various reasons—tax or immigration issues, infidelity. Domestic abuse.
Jane knows all about that. She and her daughter Tara have spent years in hiding from Tara’s manipulative and...Read more
After selling his start-up business, Sam has the kind of money only dreams are made of. Young, and married to the love of his life, it's time for Sam to enjoy his good fortune.
That is, until Sam's Chief Financial Officer is taken hostage by a ruthless criminal demanding a...Read more
Afghanistan 1982, a botched CIA operation leaves a young Ali without a family, setting him on an unpredictable path for retribution. What follows is his lifelong, meticulously planned quest for vengeance, from Afghanistan across the globe to New York. Along the way he makes enemies in a...Read more
In Winstone’s imagination, the Kid and his partner ride through the Wild West on the trail of their quarry. In Winstone’s actual life, he’s had to abandon his ‘partner’ and is hiding out in the tough landscape of Central Otago.
What has this boy run from, and how will the...Read more
Edwina’s death is brutal, a swift and silent killer who leaves no clues. Her murder seems unsolvable until a casual comment sends Inspector Alex Cameron and his seasoned team trawling through the dead woman’s childhood.
Raised in a poverty-scarred part of Auckland, Edwina was a...Read more
A skeleton is unearthed in a suburban Auckland backyard. A woman disappears. A teenager is abandoned.
These events change the trajectory of Tova Tan's life, which she is slowly rebuilding after her involvement in a traumatic kidnapping. Reluctantly, she agrees to look after the...Read more
You can't escape the desert. You can't escape Sundial.
Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because she fears what Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her of the family...Read more
The third collection in the Crimes for a Summer Christmas series, featuring stories by 14 Australian writers, including Elizabeth Jolley, Marion Halligan, Peter Corris, Brian Castro, Marele Day and Jean Bedford.
Life in the safe suburbs of Christchurch isn't dangerous enough for Marty. He needs excitement in punk, protest, politics and crackpipes. Marty soon finds Mona, a teenage runaway living in a flophouse of skinheads and goths. The two of them live for drugs and dodgy deals but they are...Read more
How well do you really know your family?
Emma Matheson is a happily married woman—so happy that she's organised a surprise party for her husband on the night of their wedding anniversary.
When Nathan doesn't turn up to the party, Emma knows something...Read more
Sandy Barrett's hiking escapades were usually uneventful and relaxing, until the day she risked her life saving a trapped seagull and tumbled down a 100 metre cliff. After tree branches miraculously broke her fall, her body lay battered on a rocky ledge. A greater horror lay await to...Read more
A novel about family secrets and discovery of a long-ago crime. Hilda is a reclusive single woman who lives on the North Kent marshes with her rescue cats. One day she has a visit from a young woman called Nicky, who claims to be her half-sister, the "love child" of Hilda's father who has...Read more
A small community, broken families, a bloody murder, and an ending you won’t see coming
When Frida Delaney returns home to New Zealand after a self-imposed exile the last thing she expects to find is her neighbour’s bloody body and to be caught up in a murder inquiry. An...Read more
A trail of blood winding through a squalid flat in Margate leads DCI Dave Gosworth to the body of Jacqui Jennings, her skull smashed with a chisel. For Dave it is just the start of a long and puzzling case...Forty miles away in South London a young single mother named Melanie Stenning is...Read more
It is two days since Dr John Brand's death and his eldest son, Davis, suspects a cover-up. Survived by two sons, the death notice said. Peacefully.
This is a lie: there are three sons, and the circumstances of their seemingly conservative father's death are unclear. No-one...Read more
In an idyllic resort on the island of La Réunion, Liane Bellion and her husband Martial are enjoying the perfect moment with their 6-year-old daughter. Turquoise skies, blue sea, palm trees, a warm breeze.
Then Liane disappears. She went up to her hotel room between 3 and 4pm...Read more
When life delivers you gifts you don’t want.
Dave Martin is down on his luck: his wife has left him; his farm is a failure; his house is a mess; he has withdrawn from his community and friends; and tragedy has stolen his capacity to care. He passes the time...Read more
A gripping story of treachery set in a scientific laboratory in post-war London
Professor Sewell and his biological research team had spent years developing new methods of controlling epidemics. Now a smooth-talking government minister was refusing to let him...Read more
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, Billy Peters disappeared. Everyone in town believes Billy was murdered--after all, serial killer Arnold Avery later admitted killing six other children and burying them on the same desolate moor that surrounds their small English village. Only Billy's mother is convinced...Read more
Inside the Black Horse is a fast-moving thriller, a story of fate, and unlikely love story for our time. Pio Morgan is waiting outside a pub on a cold winter night. There is a debt he must pay and no options left. What he does next drags a group of strangers into a web of confusion that...Read more
Fifteen years after the death of their patriarch, the Bird Clan finds itself struggling to survive on the hardscrabble reservation it calls home.
On Christmas Day, the youngest of the clan, beautiful Suzanne Bird, leaves by snowmobile with her boyfriend Gus Netmaker, against...Read more
Identical twins only look the same …
Beautiful twin sisters Iris and Summer are startlingly alike, but beyond what the eye can see lies a darkness that sets them apart. Cynical and insecure, Iris has long been envious of open-hearted Summer's seemingly never-...Read more
In Death Comes As the End, Dame Agatha Christie transports us back to ancient Egypt 2000 B.C. where a priest’s daughter, investigating a suspicious death, uncovers an asp’s nest of jealousy, betrayal, and serial murder.
It is Egypt in 2000 BC, where death gives meaning to life....Read more
Grammy night, 2021. Ruby wins 'Best Song' and makes an impulsive acceptance speech that excites nature lovers across the world. While Ruby and her band celebrate, an extreme evangelical sect, funded by covert paymasters, dispatches a disciple on a ruthless mission to England.
...Read more
Myra fell from the trapeze, and then she fell in love. Which one will hurt her the most?
Something is not right at the circus. Since Myra’s accident, there have been an unexplainable number of falls, and a strange, hot wind whispering through the tents.
Then, a new...Read more
In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what seems like an idyllic life. He idolises his father who is a lifeguard at the local faded and peeling Lido, never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man. The boy comes to believe that heroism is all....Read more
The phone call ended seven years of exile, but was a catalyst for murder . . .
When Dr Caitlin Summerfield took the message, her satisfying life included a rich, sexy boyfriend, an exciting career and, best of all, she was free of the emotional maelstrom that characterised her...Read more