This update is bought to you in the aftermath of an Easter break where not enough reading got done. To be honest, not a lot of anything much got done, I started wading through a recently deceased relative's boxes of photos and disappeared down some very nostalgic byways.
#JustFinished
The Girl from Sarajevo by Stef Harris (another from the 2026 Ngaio's list)
Bella Donna by Jill Johnson (2026 Ngaio's)
#CurrentlyReading
The Afterlife of Harry Playford by Steven Carroll (library book - may have to queue jump)
Lucky Thing by Tom Baragwanath (2026 Ngaio's)
A Beautiful Family, Jennifer Trevelyan (2026 Ngaio's)
#NextUp
The Ledge by Christian White (because I can see it from where I'm sitting most days).
Parrot Heaven by Jessica Howland Kany (because I loved the first one - A Runner's Guide to Rakiura)
What Rhymes with Murder by Penny Tangey
Red River Road by Anna Downes (after a massive nudge from somebody whose opinions I value)
The Writers Retreat by Victoria Brownlee
Later, Only Love Remains by Leah Swann
Against Their Will by Karina Kilmore
The Bookshop Detectives: Tea & Cake & Death by Gareth Ward and Louise Ward (2026 Ngaio's)
Three Dogs, Two Murders and A Cat, Rodney Strong (2026 Ngaio's)
The Girl from Sarajevo
THE GIRL FROM SARAJEVO
Young and beautiful immigrant Katia will do anything to become a novelist. When she encounters her neighbour, a once famous Croatian author, she embarks on an audacious plan to represent Dragan’s new novel as her own. Weaponising her sexuality, she enters into a cynical twisted affair with the aging wordsmith. But Dragan holds a dangerous secret that may destroy them both.
THE OTHER JASMINE
Mail order bride Wong Ji Li travelled all the way from Ningbo China to marry a wealthy man, only to find herself a virtual sex slave, imprisoned on a derelict farm. Her new husband Darryl is a giant man-child still under the thumb of his powerful mother. Wong Ji Li discovers she is not Darryl’s first victim. She must find the courage to escape her predicament or face the same fate as the other Jasmine.
Bella Donna
SECRETS ARE THE DEADLIEST POISON
Eustacia Rose is done with murder cases. She's ready to settle down with her partner, Matilde, and focus on her work at the university. To live a normal life.
But then along comes a case she can't resist investigating - because this time, the murder victim was poisoned with hemlock, one of the plants stolen from Eustacia's illicit garden of poisonous plants. And Eustacia is not the only one desperate to retrieve her lost the beguiling trader of rare plants, Zsa Zsa, and rival university professor Hutchins are on the trail, too, not to mention the dangerous criminal gang determined to keep hold of the lethal plants.
The stakes are higher than ever for Eustacia. Because if she cannot save her plants in time, there will be more deaths - and this time, the blood will be on her hands . . .
The Ledge
When human remains are discovered in a forest, police are baffled, the locals are shocked and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered.
It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, drawing his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed.
In The Ledge, past and present run breathlessly parallel, leading to a cliff-hanger nobody will see coming. This is a mind-bending new novel from the master of the unexpected.
Parrot Heaven
BDTH! The Foveaux Fisherman Facebook page posts this acronym to advise Rakiura Stewart Islanders to ‘batten down the hatches’ before severe weather events.
New Zealand’s southernmost librarian Maudie Sanderson reckons this warning could be applied to her life in general these days.
Haunted by a parrot and falsely accused of soliciting d**k pics, Maudie navigates a minefield of rabbit holes and mental health crises as she struggles to be a fit and proper person in a pandemic-hungover world. Sidelined by buggered knees, the avid runner needs projects to maintain sanity.
Island life keeps her busy. Maudie is drawn into an axe cult, scraps with the preschool teacher, discusses The Epic of Gilgamesh in a jailhouse book club, and mis-manages a community astronomy course. When a shocking crime wreaks havoc on her family, she dons her deerstalker cap and dives into the investigation.
All the while, Maudie feels a growing kinship with the ancient desert king Gilgamesh, as the words from 5,000-year-old clay tablets guide her through life’s myriad of mysteries.
What Rhymes With Murder?
When exhausted new mother Frida attends Baby Rhyme Time at the local library, she feels a sense of purpose that has been lacking in her anxious, apartment-bound, sleep-deprived life. But at the end of the session a piercing scream is heard, followed by the thump of a body, and the library becomes a crime scene.
Before long, Frida finds herself part of an unlikely group of sleuths investigating the murder. Between gossip and cups of magic at their local cafe, they are too busy having fun to realise how close they are to danger . . .
Red River Road
On the Coral Coast of Western Australia, solo traveller Katy is on a mission to find her free-spirited sister, Phoebe, who disappeared along the same route a year ago. But as she drives her campervan further into the wild north, Katy realises she's not as alone as she'd first believed. Soon she is pulled into a complicated web of secrets, lies, myths and stories that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her sister.
In this nerve-shredding outback thriller, our obsessions with freedom and beauty collide with our fear of what lies in the wilderness, and the truth behind Phoebe's disappearance proves stranger and darker than Katy could ever have guessed...
The Afterlife of Harry Playford
What does a pile of clothes left on a deserted beach tell you? It's a cold midwinter Monday. Seaweed and shells litter the flat expanse of sand. There is a light wind, the sea more disgruntled than choppy, the tide out. And there amongst it, the neat pile of clothes. Almost like a coded message waiting to be deciphered.'
Queenscliff, Victoria, 1951: A man has disappeared, leaving only a pile of neatly folded clothes on a beach. Missing, presumed drowned. But for Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, newly emigrated from England, it's far from an open-and-shut case. Because this is no ordinary man. Harry Playford is a successful politician, a charming man who is a rising ministerial star, a possible contender for the top job, who leaves behind a beautiful wife - and a mistress. There could be a simple explanation. But, these murky days of the Cold War, in a time of rising mistrust and suspicion, spies and espionage, Stephen can't throw off his feeling that something's definitely not right. About the whole business.
A Beautiful Family
Over the course of one sunbaked summer vacation, a family is pulled into a web of mysteries that the younger daughter sets out to solve. A tense, page-turning debut of childhood, innocence, and evil.
At ten years old, she catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.
But things aren't quite as they seem, and as the children look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they wish they'd never uncovered. Are her parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, the family find themselves at the center of an urgent police investigation.
Debut novelist Jennifer Trevelyan viscerally captures the confusion and frustration of childhood, the fraught but unshakeable bond between sisters, and the dangers that lurk in the white lies we tell--especially about the people we love most.
The Writers Retreat
A wickedly twisty and atmospheric thriller set at a writers' retreat in the South of France, The Writers Retreat is Knives Out meets Anna Downes’ The Safe Place from an exciting new voice in the thriller/mystery space.
Welcome to The Writers Retreat – a creative haven for writers to hone their plotlines and sharpen their characters while soaking up the Provençal atmosphere. But this year’s retreat offers something different, as real-life blurs with fiction, and suspense isn't contained to the page.
Kat Hale is a bestselling Australian author crumbling under the pressure of writing her second novel. On a whim, she has fled to a writers retreat in the South of France run by internationally acclaimed author Helen Thorne. What Kat hopes will be two blissfully uninterrupted weeks to focus on her writing in anonymity quickly turns into something more sinister, when Kat begins to suspect that Helen isn't quite as perfect as everyone seems to believe.
Will Kat’s drive to uncover the truth about Helen be any match for Helen’s desire to hold onto her career, her reputation and her writing retreat, or is Kat at risk of falling victim to a more dangerous climax?
Lucky Thing
“The nights aren’t too cold yet, lucky thing. Otherwise we’d be having a different conversation.”
Jessica Mowbrie, beaten and dumped in the bush like a sack of garbage and lying comatose in a hospital bed: lucky to be alive.
Lorraine Henry doesn’t think Jess is so lucky. She thinks whoever hurt her needs to be hunted down. But the Masterton police are isolated and underresourced, and to be honest, even though Lorraine works for them, she thinks they’re a bit hopeless.
So it might be up to Lorraine to do the hunting. She’s not getting any younger, of course. But she has all the police records at her fingertips—and as much information about who hates who as anyone in Masterton. Plus, she’s used to being underestimated. And you should never underestimate a middle-aged woman with justice in her sights.
Honey
The first time, Yrsa doesn’t intend to kill.
But the Cambridge professor sitting opposite has manipulated her friend, stolen her research. When she flicks the bee into his Sanpellegrino, she thinks he’ll get a nasty sting.
Then he’s dead. And Yrsa, who – let’s face it – has been bored for a while, is alive.
It’s a sweet feeling, finally having some control.
Comic, sexy, addictive, unpredictable, Honey is about the not-always-righteous path of taking justice into your own hands.
Hero
DS Lucas Walker is back home in Queensland, following the dramatic fallout from his last case. He is just getting to grips with his new role in the small outback town of Katima, when the body of an unknown young man is found hanging from a tree in the park.
What at first looks like a tragic suicide soon has Walker's detective instincts on alert, and he and his young partner throw themselves into the case - discovering a connection with an unsolved death.
And then a brutal murder changes everything. The victim is Caden Conroy, national cricketing hero, and the dark nature of his death leads to an unparallelled media frenzy.
When Walker is sidelined by Brisbane Homicide after being first on the scene, he must go his own way to unpick the deceit and corruption at the heart of these cases. Only then will he know if they are connected, and how - but at what cost?
Later, Only Love Remains
From award-winning, bestselling writer Leah Swann comes a lyrical, powerful, dark and devastating novel. once you start reading, you will not be able to put this novel down.
Jack Wolfe, a difficult, complicated old man, retreats to a remote family shack in the Otway Forest near the Great Ocean Road to grieve his wife's death in a car crash where he was the driver. It's cold, with endless wind and rain, and the bush shack is basic. But he's half mad with remorse and old memories of wrongs he has done to others, so what Jack craves more than anything is forgiveness - and solitude.
Instead, he meets Lotus, an exuberant yet lonely young woman who insists on trying to help him, although he's determined to keep her at bay. He doesn't want or need anyone. But late one night, when his dog starts howling, Jack discovers a shivering and wet stranger on his property. Is this man a dangerous threat, or someone who simply needs his help? His late wife would want him to show kindness, but he can't help suspecting the man's motives. And what should he do about the unwanted friendship from Lotus, with whom he has a surprise connection?
A tense, powerfully compelling story with a spiralling, slow-burn intensity which escalates into a gut-wrenching, dark and achingly beautiful read, Later, Only Love Remains is a propulsive and unputdownable novel about the violence of men, birth and death, the yearning for redemption, and the endless wellspring that is love.
Against Their Will
After walking away from traditional journalism, Danny Boyd is recruited to The Open—a covert investigative unit hunting the world’s darkest criminal networks. She proves herself quickly, until a mission against Kronos, a brutal trafficking syndicate, blows her cover. Ordered to stand down, Danny refuses. Children are still vanishing. Kronos is still out there.
Forced to moonlight as a PI, Danny takes a case a bit closer to home: a wealthy Ohio family unraveling after their patriarch, real estate developer Bob Wilson, is killed in a botched robbery. His will exposes shocking betrayals and a secret heir, so the Wilsons hire Danny to dig deeper. What begins as a privileged family succession dispute soon unearths deadly secrets, financial schemes, and a legacy of bitter revenge.
But someone is watching her. Is it Kronos? Or the Wilson family’s enemies? With two ruthless forces closing in, Danny must expose the truth—this time with no backup and nowhere to hide—before she’s silenced for good.
The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death
When we opened Sherlock Tomes people warned us that we’d made a terrible mistake. The one thing they didn’t warn us about was the murders . . .
The Bookshop Detectives are on the case!
In this rollicking new adventure, Garth and Eloise (and Stevie) must sniff out a prolific poisoner ahead of a vital fundraising event, the Battle of the Book Clubs. As time runs out and the body count rises, it seems the bad actors are circling closer to the people and places they care about.
Could Pinter, the infamous serial killer from Eloise’s past, somehow be involved? And when anyone could be a suspect, how can Garth and Eloise keep their customers, their small town and their beloved bookshop safe?
Three Dogs, Two Murders and A Cat
Nicolette Briggs doesn’t do humans.
As Wellington’s premier, and possibly only, animal detective, Nicolette mostly investigates missing pets and cases of animal cruelty. So when her latest client asks her to investigate a case of a poisoned cat, it seems right up her alley. Until a body shows up, then another, and suddenly despite her resolve to not get involved, Nicolette is right in the middle two murder investigations. Or is it just one killer?
When someone breaks into her house and one of her dogs is injured, Nicolette’s reluctance turns to determination to not only solve this thing before the police, but show up her stubborn police detective brother in the process.
Along the way she has to navigate a daughter about to turn 15, a dwindling bank account, and a dysfunctional family that seems determined to fix her. Not to mention a killer who’s turned their sights her way.
No wonder she doesn’t do humans.
Three Dogs, Two Murders, and a Cat is the first book in the clean, cozy mystery series. Gilmore Girls meets Nancy Drew, with a touch of dysfunctional families, a touch of humour, and a touch of caring.
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