A Madras Miasma

Madras in the 1920s. The British are slowly losing the grip on the subcontinent. The end of the colonial enterprise is in sight and the city on India’s east coast is teeming with intrigue. A grisly murder takes place against the backdrop of political tension and Superintendent Le Fanu, a...Read more

A Watery Grave

The year is 1838, and after more than ten years in the planning, the famous United States Exploring Expedition is set to launch into uncharted waters from the coast of Virginia. A convoy of seven ships filled with astronomers, mapmakers, naturalists, and the sailors charged with getting...Read more

A Man Lay Dead

Ngaio Marsh's classic first novel, which introduced Inspector Alleyn and set Ngaio Marsh on the path to international recognition. Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley's original and lively weekend house-parties are deservedly famous. To amuse his guests, he has devised a new form of the...Read more

Above Suspicion

Like an eye on the ceiling, ABOVE SUSPICION is watching the detectives. So busy, so serious - if only they could see how funny they look!

Sly, lighthearted, hardheaded, original, ABOVE SUSPICION is an entertainment.

Gaelyn Gordon overhears muddle-class New Zealand...Read more

Murder in the Second Row

"There are many things that can go wrong between casting a show and Opening Night. Finding a body in the second row is just one of them.

Jessica Jones is well aware that the old Regent Theatre is at crisis point. As theatre manager she is responsible for most of the productions...Read more

The Book of Guilt

England, 1979. Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme. Every day, the triplets do their chores, play their games and take their medicine, under the watchful eyes of three Mother Morning, Mother...Read more

Sergeant Kelly's Elephant

After surviving an assassination attempt in Sydney, HRH Prince Alfred, accompanied by his pet baby elephant, Tom, arrives in colonial New Zealand in 1870. The authorities are on high alert as there are Fenian troubles in the goldfields.Read more

All Their Sins

How well do you really know your family?

Emma Matheson is a happily married woman—so happy that she's organised a surprise party for her husband on the night of their wedding anniversary.

When Nathan doesn't turn up to the party, Emma knows something...Read more

When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole

It’s January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand’s rugged King Country.

It’s a bittersweet he’s working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother’s house, and he’s...Read more

Wrongdoings

1943 - Winton, Southland, New Zealand. Marine Randolph Harrington, the charismatic and handsome saxophonist of a visiting United States Marines jazz band, is found murdered by the banks of the Oreti River.Read more

Ōkiwi Brown

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with an...Read more

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud

Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.

All are women of the...Read more

Safekeeping

Rebecca Eaton has the sort of job you don’t talk about at parties. She’s a lawyer for children, a defender of the defenceless, a voice for the voiceless. At times, she even needs to protect parents from themselves.

It’s grim work, but the law is there to protect people, right?...Read more

The Wrong Girl

A 15-year-old girl is hiding from her biological father in an exclusive boarding school for difficult girls in New Zealand. She and her mother changed their names and hair, but they live with their getaway bags packed.Read more

Guardians

GUARDIANS contains all the loved and colourful characters from the first book as Robert/Bob journeys on his dangerous path of truths and non-truths, justice (tika), and murderous revenge connected to his family's past. A gripping good yarn with fast actions, the spiritual world of spiritual...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

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

The Royal Free

James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the ‘third oldest medical journal in the world’, the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices – the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).Read more

A House Built on Sand

Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files—and her job as a result. Her marbles? ‘Mild cognitive impairment’, according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose.

Rose has her own troubles with...Read more

Where the River Goes

A champion of regenerative farming is brutally murdered. An intensive dairying advocate has shot himself. What is going on in this peaceful rural community?

Lauren Fraser, visiting South Canterbury, puts herself in danger as she begins to unravel the tangle of criminal activity...Read more

The Night She Fell

‘When I last saw Ashleigh, she was lying in a pool of blood . . . Her eyes were open, staring sightlessly into the sky. I’d like to think she saw the stars before she died; that in her last moments she flew, soaring on serotonin, dreamy with dopamine. I’d like to think she didn’t suffer...Read more

Uncovered

A skeleton is unearthed in a suburban Auckland backyard. A woman disappears. A teenager is abandoned.

These events change the trajectory of Tova Tan's life, which she is slowly rebuilding after her involvement in a traumatic kidnapping. Reluctantly, she agrees to look after the...Read more

Girl of the Mountains

All she had to do now was disappear.

The Hermitage Mt Cook, New Zealand, 1946 When the volatile Stella is hired as a mountain guide she vows never to return to a life of domesticity below the snowline. With her mentor Philip and troubled returned...Read more

A Fly Under The Radar

Lawyers, drugs, deaths, and sneakiness, in New Zealand.

A Fly Under the Radar is a ripping yarn. It’s cantankerous and unexpected, with an eccentric cast that includes a millennial side-kick, a conniving landlord, a dangerous accountant, and starring a misanthropic...Read more

The Mires

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks...Read more

Lie Down With Dogs

Back on the job after a disastrous undercover investigation, Detective Kyle Williams is hanging on by a thread. While recovering from being shot and losing the love of his life, he’s drawn into the dark, cold-case murder of two young lovers who got mixed up with the wrong crowd.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

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

Death and the Dancing Girl

In 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, Tom Blake learns his wife is lost in France. She was arrested by the Gestapo but where is she now? More shocking, when last seen, Madeleine was pregnant. Tom returns to a France that has been devastated by war to try and find both his...Read more

Love in Lockdown

Oak Tree Lodge is a classy inner-city boarding house with just four guest rooms. But there is nothing classy about Leo Murdoch, the proprietor, who lives upstairs and spies on his guests.

Covid-19 is sweeping the world, and the country is hours from lockdown. Meg Hart, a...Read more

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