I hope that, because it's Friday the 13th, my current streak of looking vaguely like I'm catching up doesn't end in a screaming heap.
#JustFinished
#CurrentlyReading
Black Velvet and Vengeance by Deborah Challinor (library book so will have to jump the queue a bit)
The Retired Assassins Guide to Country Gardening by Naomi Kuttner (2026 Ngaio's)
#NextUp
What You Don't Know by Sandi Wallace (overdue!)
The Girl from Sarajevo by Stef Harris (another from the 2026 Ngaio's list)
Bella Donna by Jill Johnson (2026 Ngaio's)
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)
Three Reasons for Revenge by Dervla McTiernan
What Rhymes with Murder by Penny Tangey
Bloom by Mary Fowler (library book - I'm a bit of a Matilda's Tragic...)
What You Don't Know
Home on a secluded island should be safe… but isn’t.
Tess and Joe are living the dream on Wyeebo Island. She writes children’s mystery books and loves having her husband home on weekends. He has it all, a travelling job he excels in and a wife he adores.
But how well do they really know who they’re married to?
A prowler in Tess’s neighbourhood triggers trauma over her best friend’s unsolved death – and dread of history repeating. Tess does odd things she can’t remember, and Joe acts cagey. They each have secrets that converge with the abduction of a young local woman.
Who can they trust when they don’t trust each other, or themselves? With nobody and nowhere safe, can Tess stop what she doesn’t understand... or will somebody else die because of her?
What You Don't Know, Sandi Wallace
A stand-alone novel from Australian author, Sandi Wallace, WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW is set on a secluded island where Tess works at home, writing children's mystery books, and her travelling husband returns to on weekends from the job he loves, to a wife that he adores. It seems, to all the world, like the perfect life, enough neighbours to create a sense of community, enough distance to create a buffer, a sense of sanctuary, even a goofy chocolate labrador dog. A feeling shattered by sightings of a prowler, triggering unresolved trauma for Tess - her best friend's death was never explained, and suddenly Tess is doing all sorts of odd things she can't explain, and Joe seems to be hiding something. Then a young local woman is abducted and what seemed idyllic suddenly starts to look very shakey indeed.
The use of secrets and past events to set up a present day threat isn't new territory in crime fiction, but WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW uses them, and the isolated, almost locked room setting, to good effect. The inclusion of electronic stalking and hijacked communication is also a very current day and real threat, which creates a sense of immediacy and overall / overwhelming threat here that invokes such confusion in Tess, and therefore becomes increasingly unsettling - the idea of who you can trust when everything suddenly gets very odd is palpable here.
The setting is well invoked as well - small community / small island and the immediacy of the weather and the remoteness is cleverly done, as is the author's own knowledge of the solitary life of an author, made even more stark by Joe's long absences from home. His reasons for being away - a salesman on the road selling environmentally-friendly insulation is plausible, but on the home front there's a neighbour who has suddenly started behaving oddly, and some weird in house things - passages of text appearing in her work in progress, things moving / going missing / adding to the presence of that stalker, meaning a constant ramping up of the pressure, tension and fear. And, in something that is again all too believable, a lurking property developer, pushy and unpleasant.
Meanwhile there's Kathy, held captive for nearly forty years, keeping her feelings on scraps of paper, determined to never let her much older captor break her spirit.
So a lot going on, much of which has Tess as the obvious connection, which will leave the reader really wondering about her sanity, whilst also open to questioning Joe's commitment to his wife, or maybe there's something dodgy about the neighbours and the island in general, whilst always there's the thought of who on earth Kathy is in the background.
Whilst it could all sound very busy, the pace is high, and events, and introductions to a lot of people and situations roll out quickly, with the reader never struggling to keep track of who or what although why doesn't become clear (as you'd expect) until you get to the ending of what was a very believable, tension packed ride of a novel.
Bang!
Perth, 1981.
Brothel madam Destiny Purcell controlled half the city's vice trade—until someone executed her on a golf course in the rain.
The police blame a junkie. Case closed.
For fans of Snowtown, James Ellroy, and Underbelly, BANG! delivers brutal Australian noir where corrupt cops, motorcycle clubs, and a desperate young killer collide in 1980s Perth—Australia's most isolated city, with its own rules and its own justice.
But in a city where the Purple Circle controls everything from shadows, where motorcycle clubs enforce for the powerful, and where sin is managed—not outlawed—nothing is ever that simple.
Someone wanted her dead. The wrong man took the fall.
Rain washes away evidence. It doesn't wash away guilt.
Bang!, Taliyah Stone
The website of author Taliyah Stone has an interesting byline:
Australian crime fiction based on real events from the 1980s underworld. Written by an anonymous author with insider knowledge.
BANG! is the first entrant in a trilogy to be followed up by DIRTY! (to be released 3rd July, 2026) and TAKEN! (to be released late 2026).
Set in the early 1980's in Perth, Western Australia, the opening novella (125 or so pages) tells the story of the murder of brothel madam Destiny Purcell. Shot at the wheel of her car, on a golf course in Perth, it was a wet and dismal sort of a night, and the only evidence that could be gleaned was a single image of an unidentifiable man on a pushbike near the scene at the right time.
Meanwhile the city is controlled by a shadowy group of influential men known as the Purple Circle, who use motorcycle clubs as enforcers, and managed sin as a controlling factor, it all comes down to money and power.
Told in a noir styled tone, in a series of short sharp chapters, BANG! packs quite a bit into a small space. The intricacies of the Purple Circle and the bikies, and the influence that they assert, and the people who they control are well fleshed out, as is the existence of the shadowy killer, who eventually outs himself, after the wrong man takes the blame for the killing of Destiny Purcell. Along the way other people get hurt, lives spiral out of control and the money and power stay exactly where the Circle wants it.
The tone here is pretty spot on, although there were a few points where a bit of the repetition did detract slightly from the pace, and noir stylings. Given the shortness of the work, there's enough character exposition to give the reader a handle on who was who in this story, and the evil at the heart of it all.
I'm more than a bit of a fan of fiction with a dark, black heart though, and BANG! certainly gave this reader a chance to contemplate the worst of human nature.
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.
The Retired Assassin's Guide to Country Gardening
Dante has come to the small coastal town of Te Kohe, New Zealand, for a fresh start in life. But he doesn't want to open a BnB, or save a charming bookshop, or start a romance with a single mother in need of rescuing.
He just wants to forget about his past career (which involved a lot of dead bodies) and have everyone leave him the heck alone. Unfortunately for Dante, life has other plans...
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.
Three Reasons for Revenge
Alexis Turner walks into the police station to report an assault. By the end of the day, she is nowhere to be found.
Soon after she disappears, three identical packages arrive at three very different a respected psychologist's home, a socialite's mansion, and a struggling single father's run-down apartment. Inside, each gift is perfectly tailored to its recipient - and each will tear apart the life of its intended victim.
Detective Sergeant Judith Lee is smart and experienced, but this is no ordinary case. Someone with intimate knowledge of their targets is orchestrating these attacks. Someone who knows exactly how to hurt each victim where they're most vulnerable. And she's convinced that somehow, it connects back to Alexis Turner.
As she races to uncover the connection between three seemingly unrelated people, Judith discovers she's no longer just investigating the game - she's being forced to play.
Three Reasons for Revenge, Dervla McTiernan
Alexis Turner walks into a police station to report her assault by a psychologist - the same man that DS Judith Lee has taken a report about in the past. By the end of that same day Turner appears to have vanished, and Lee is dealing with the guilt that she feels over the poor advice she gave the first accuser 10 years ago. It's a job a bit outside Lee's normal remit, but nothing in Lee's life is exactly normal right now. She's also dealing with the fallout of her arrest of a fellow police officer, a nepo baby of the worst kind, a corrupt thug and a bully protected by his higher up father. Lee has some support in the service, albeit a lot of which stays very low under the radar, meanwhile her motorbike is vandalised in police parking and it seems that her career could very well be in jeopardy.
Soon after Turner vanished into thin air, beautifully wrapped packages, containing cryptic notes start showing up. At the psychologist's home, a socialite's mansion, and the run down apartment where a single father, Jack, lives with his young son after the suicide of his partner many years before, a complicated relationship, leaving him doing the very best he can to raise his son, without realising the full extent of her experience.
Until the psychologist is shot dead, the socialite and her young daughter die from poisoning and the young father is framed for their murders. It's an elaborate, and dangerous plot that's being executed by somebody who seems to be in the know, very well prepared and resourceful, especially as it looks like Lee is the only person who starts to see some connections, which have to be painstakingly pieced together by trawling backwards through old records, to find the source of the gun, and then a hint of a possible explanation or connection. Meanwhile the threat becomes very personal as Lee's past actions are pulled into what's a complicated and very chilling story.
Styled as a thriller, this is also a story of childhood trauma, and the way that society struggles to find a way to help those that have been severely damaged by the actions of others. It pulls Lee into that scenario whilst also revealing her own family backstory and a violent event in the past, that could very well be used against her by this determined and ruthless perpetrator. Each of the victims seems to have been punished, sexual misbehaviour revealed, betrayal uncovered, and ultimately, a young father manipulated into appearing for all the world to be the guilty party.
There is a lot going on in THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE, and looking at it objectively, you'd think that it might be just a bit overwhelming, but the multiple stories are rolled out carefully, with the reader able to follow a complicated series of backgrounds, and the revelations without any heavy lifting on their part. Unlike the characters here, many of whom, not least Lee herself, are doing some very heavy lifting of their own, as the novel explores the way that childhood trauma informs current day actions - both positively and negatively - forming personality types that can go either way. The strength of this novel is not so much in the investigation, which is excellently portrayed, fast paced and cleverly constructed, but rather in the exploration of trauma and the reactions. Particularly the way that Judith and her, frankly unhinged mother, remember and react to the past that involved them both, reflected in the way that two sisters were affected by the actions of a violent, awful father, and the realisation of those outcomes on the people around them.
THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE is confronting reading, intense and powerful, it's a highly recommended revenge story that has some very battered edges to it.
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 . . .
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