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.
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The River Picnic was one of the biggest events that ever took place in Coongahoola, and even wilder than the street party the night Malcolm Fraser became Prime Minister. The adults spoke about it in whispers and only when they thought us kids were out of earshot. All I knew for sure,...Read more
Rachel McManus has just started at the New Zealand Alarm and Response Ministry. One of the few females working there, she is forced to traverse the peculiarities of Wellington bureaucracy, lascivious colleagues, and decades of sedimented hierarchy. She has the chance to prove herself by...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
Set against a backdrop of actual events in 1995, Martyn Percival, a middle-aged New Zealander, seeks adventure on his first OE to the United Kingdom. A chance sighting, providing a possible link between an explosion that has rocked the nation and the whereabouts of a renegade IRA operative...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
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Elias Dunn hates his life. At only 26, he’s the youngest Head of IT for Network 4 and appears to be doing okay. He’s not. He’s living at home with a bipolar mother who uses medication and alcohol to get by. Eli loses himself in fantasy and obsession, stalking targets and colleagues to cope...Read more
Karen's life is abruptly thrown into chaos when her flatmate is gunned down in front of her in the street where they live.
Within days she is forced to take drastic action to ensure her own safety. She criss-crosses New Zealand to evade the killers, changes her appearance and...Read more
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
At 8 he was smuggling heroin out of the house when his parents were raided. At 15 he was using heroin every day. At 17 he was earning $1200 a week selling cocaine. At 18 he was sentenced to life in Penang Prison plus six strokes of the cane for drug trafficking. At 29 he was pardoned ......Read more
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
Summer, 1929. Three young women are rocketing across the hot Canterbury Plains in a fast roadster: smoking, drinking - laughing. But soon all this is to change. In a plot worthy of a Ngaio Marsh fiction, lives are about to be shattered by shafts of jealousy, madness and revenge.
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Why are sex offenders and murderers the way they are? Can they change? And how can we protect our families? Forensic scientist Nigel Latta has spent a large part of his working life trying to answer these questions. In the first two editions of Into the Darklands, he took us into the...Read more
Claire is a Dunedin freelance writer who is hired by a dodgy lawyer to write a biography of a serial rapist at present in prison. She's wary, but she's a solo mother with a teenage daughter and desperately needs the money. The rapist's very name, Travis Crill, inspires revulsion from...Read more
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