The Edge of Myself

A man on fire, a self-imposed lockdown and a badly timed love.

When introverted junior architect Estelle says no to the annual holiday, her family become even more disgruntled with her than usual. Choosing solitude over a five star, eight-week international trip means even co-...Read more

Surveillance

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear ...

Journalist Grace Marks, needing a story to boost her career and finances, is intrigued by a surge in minor crime in New Zealand suburbs. She discovers it’s organised, but why?

Her investigations lead her to...Read more

Frederick's Coat

When Johno comes out of prison, he resolves never to go back again. But his new life is not easy, especially as he soon finds himself in sole charge of his strange young son, Danny. Danny isn't the kind of son he would have chosen, but, in caring for the boy, Johno finds new meaning and new...Read more

Marcia's Dead

Who killed Marcia?
Beautiful but difficult, Marcia...

Ted answers the telephone to discover his ex-wife, Marcia, is dead, accidentally drowned in the sea below the house that he built on a remote beach in the north of New Zealand, a house he lost in the divorce....Read more

A Sickle for My Sweetheart

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

Silent as the Snow

Four friends.
One tragic death.
20 years of secrets and lies.

One wintery night, when they are young, Anna and her three friends Rudy, Seth, and Dougal are involved in an accident in...Read more

The Birds of Gondwanaland

It's 1962, and all is not as it should be in this sleepy rural town. An elderly war widow wakes up to discover the naked body of a young man in the uppermost boughs of her Macrocarpa tree.

It's up to Senior Constable Elspeth Belfry and her lieutenant, Caddie, to solve the...Read more

The Gallows Bird

London 1838: The cast-out child of an aristocratic mother, Hannah 'Birdie' Bird is a laundry maid with a hidden past and a suspicion that the wealthy family she serves is hers.

Longing for beauty and liberation, Birdie risks everything to change her circumstances. She falls into...Read more

Anyone Can Murder

When Hubert Carson, the editorial manager of the Herald Newspaper in Auckland, is found dead in his office, the autopsy reveals that it was a blow on the head that killed him, a mild heart attack probably causing him to fall. Carson's fellow employees are not so sure. They knew that the...Read more

Burial

Nathan has never been able to forget the worst night of his life:  the party that led to the sudden, shocking disappearance of a young woman.  Only he and Bob, an old acquaintance, know what really happened and they have resolved to keep it that way.  But one rainy night, years later, Bob...Read more

Beneath the Snow

It's been a long, hard winter in the small Alaskan town of Lake's Edge - and things are about to get even tougher. Lisa McCall, a young and brilliant research scientist, has disappeared out in the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of a snowstorm. Lisa's sister, Abby - shaken by the news -...Read more

A History of Crime: The Southern Double-Cross

The most dangerous people are those with the most to lose.

It is 1887. The young colony of New Zealand is in the grip of a deep depression. Insolvent speculators conspire with corrupt politicians while Maori land slips from the hands of its owners.

Into this...Read more

Bold Blood

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

Deep in the Shallows

A romantic mystery set at a beautiful lake in the South Island of New Zealand. Andrea North is looking forward to a job at Lake Waihola as a way to escape from a man who tried to control her life, but an easy task is soon complicated by a house with a secret hoard, dead birds, and a close...Read more

Death on the Quay

Nurse Lora Spencer is stabbed to death by an unknown assailant during the morning rush hour on Wellington’s Lambton Quay. A freelance journalist, Adam Adair, finds himself holding the dying woman in his arms. Haunted by the experience, Adair decides to investigate. Lora’s relatives and...Read more

The Snow Thief

When a little boy is found with his neck broken, Lhasa detective Shan Lia leaves her broken past behind and throws herself into the investigation. He is the fifth child to die the same way in as many weeks.

But Lia’s superiors don’t want her looking for a serial killer. They...Read more

Fallen Through The Cracks

Anna and Richard, a middle-aged couple who have faced unexpected trauma and upheaval in their lives, decide to move to Australia to start afresh. They leave their friends and two adult sons behind, determined to view the move as a mid-life adventure.

However, it isn't long...Read more

A Cold Wind Down the Grey

Greymouth, New Zealand, 1866: The Burgess gang is heading towards town, and a young surveyor from one of the country's leading families has vanished. Inspector James is preparing for trouble.

In the gold-mining town of Greymouth, where drunks fall asleep...Read more

Soldiers

Breen sometimes thought sourly that Tiger Jackson would have made a good fascist. He told unreliable stories, he liked power and admiration, and he had all three military virtues- self-belief, luck, and an eye for the main chance. Despite all this, Breen liked him. Somehow it was impossible...Read more

The Vanishing Act

Respectable appearances can hide the blackest of secrets.

The Vanishing Act is a spicy tale of intrigue set in 1960s New Zealand, where society’s constraints and the laws of the day made outcasts of lesbians and prostitutes.

Rosemary Cawley is used...Read more

Hive of Lies

Fraud, dead bodies and manuka honey. Who knew accounting could be dangerous?!

Newly returned to Auckland, accountant Claire Conner thinks her first day on the job can’t get any worse- intimidating receptionist, torn skirt and a fire evacuation. Then she’s told her friend Anne...Read more

A Good Winter

I looked after Lara. We both looked after Sophie and her baby. We had to. It’s not like Sophie was going to look after that baby herself. All she was interested in was weeping and wailing for her dead husband. She was so busy weeping and wailing for her dead husband that she rejected...Read more

Embedded

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

Home Before Night

As the third wave of the virus hits, all inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8pm to get to their homes. Wherever they are when the curfew hits, they must live for four weeks and stay within a 5km radius. When Lou’s son Samuel doesn’t arrive home by nightfall she begins to panic....Read more

The Foster Mother

There's a world of difference between a mother and a psychopath. But sometimes, it's hard to tell them apart...

When a young mother abandons her baby in a crowded park, Nora steps in to take her place. Little does Nora know that this act of kindness will plunge her into a...Read more

17 Years Later

Is the truth sometimes best left buried?

A crime masterpiece by bestselling author J. P. Pomare

The violent slaughter of the wealthy Primrose family while they slept shocked the nation of New Zealand and scarred the small idyllic rural town of...Read more

Trapdoor

Live streaming now! Trapdoor - Five go in, none come out.

Eva Kavinsky wakes in a dark cellar, with no memory of how she got here. Imprisoned with her, seemingly at random, are four men. The only way out is the trapdoor in the ceiling – and it's locked.

The single clue...Read more

The Games We Play

A phantom in the shadows, moving beneath the shroud of London’s night, David prowls the desolate park. Unaware of danger, his victims fall into his trap with cold precision, solidifying his grim reputation as the ‘London Strangler’.Read more

Kiss of Death

It’s 1918, in a Wellington that few people would recognise today, and two major events are about to the signing of the Armistice to end World War I, and the soldier-borne plague we now call the Spanish flu. Into this comes Wellington's only female lawyer, leading her group of Sapphist...Read more

Pages