This update is bought to you a day early because of the Easter Break which, this year, I hope will be focused on reading, in the spirit of the Norway Easter Crime Tradition. Fingers crossed the weather co-operates and nobody sets fire to anything for a change.
#JustFinished
What You Don't Know by Sandi Wallace
The Strength of Old Shale by Kirsty Powell (2026 Ngaio's)
#CurrentlyReading
The Girl from Sarajevo by Stef Harris (another from the 2026 Ngaio's list)
Bella Donna by Jill Johnson (2026 Ngaio's)
The Afterlife of Harry Playford by Steven Carroll (library book - may have to queue jump)
#NextUp
Lucky Thing by Tom Baragwanath (2026 Ngaio's)
A Beautiful Family, Jennifer Trevelyan (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)
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, Victoria Brownlee
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.
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 . . .
The Strength of Old Shale
When bones of a mother and her child, wrapped in a Shetland lace shawl, are dug up from a forgotten graveyard, two worlds collide.
Ariel is raised on an isolated farm in New Zealand. She’s tough but when she’s blamed for an accident for which she has no recollection, her world implodes. Ariel seeks refuge back at university in Dunedin where she prefers the company of old gold-miners bones to real people.
Isbell is also tough and running from ghosts. As a young woman she has left behind depression times in Shetland and now makes her way from Ballarat, Australia to the New Zealand goldfields caring for 54 Cobb and Co coach horses in the hold of the SS India. The year is1861.
Is there a link between these two worlds, wrapped in that old shale?
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.
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