All the Reviews

To The Sea, Nikki Crutchley

Iluka, perched above the Pacific Ocean, is a beautiful, isolated, place, home to Ana and her family. Her grandfather's sanctuary, somewhere more complicated for her mother and Ana. It is, however, a place where creativity abounds, and Ana's aunt runs an artists' retreat there, her grandfather is a furniture maker and her uncle tends the land. Ana and her mother Anahita seems less settled, less in tune, perhaps not helped by living in the main house with the grandfather, a difficult man to say the least.

TO THE SEA is a shifting timeline novel, with two main narrators - ... Read Review

The Quiet People, Paul Cleave

Back when I first discovered Paul Cleave's books and the Theodore Tate series in particular, I did wonder if he really liked frightening the living daylights out of his readers. I'm not talking horror or anything here, but the creepy, persistent sense of terror that invades those books has been responsible for some lost sleep hours and locked doors in these parts. Lately though I'm starting to realise it's his characters he's trying to exact some sort of revenge on. In the beginning of THE QUIET PEOPLE you could be forgiven for wondering what Cameron and Lisa Murdoch did to deserve ... Read Review

Blue Hotel, Chad Taylor

Ray Moody is washed up. He drinks too much and won't look after himself. He's separated from his wife (it's more complicated than that), living in the house that her family still pays for and he's got a full time pre-occupation with separating himself from his career. So explaining the double disappearance of Blanca Nul in small-town New Zealand becomes his quest, as well as an excellent way of pretending that the meltdown that is his own life isn't happening.

BLUE HOTEL is darkest crime noir. It takes place in old fashioned newsrooms, questionable newsagencies, seedy ... Read Review

Wipptee, Jai Baidell

I used to keep count of "girl in a hat" (and man standing on a foggy street corner) book covers. But in this case, you know the sort of thing, book covers for rural / romance styled novels with girls looking off into the distance, over fields of golden (dry) grass, akubra style hat firmly on head. Not a sign of sun blemishes, squinting eyes, dry skin, chafed hands, bandaids, broken fingernails, bruised arms, or scratches from the hay bales. The hats are pretty well always devoid of signs of wear, tear and the sort of battering that comes from being trampled in stockyards... So ... Read Review

Shadow Over Edmund Street, Suzanne Frankham

Edwina Biggs has lead a quiet life, battling to make ends meet, working a mundane job with antisocial hours, living a restrained life in a contained neighbourhood. Things were changing at last though as she'd recently swapped the big family home for a small cottage on Edmund Street, learnt to drive, and bought herself a car and some freedom. For a long time though, she's been a blurry character to all around her, one of those myriad of quiet women, living unremarkable lives. Until she died on a wet, blustery, cold Sunday morning, in her recently acquired car, at the foot of a cliff, ... Read Review

A Runner's Guide to Rakiura, Jessica Howland Kany

Started this book with absolutely no idea what I was going to get, got through the first quarter with no idea what was going on, ended the whole thing thoroughly enjoying every word of it.

Maudie is the central character of this novel, a millenial New Yorker who, on assigment to cover Aotearoa New Zealand's southern-most running trails, takes herself to Rakiura Stewart Island. She's erratic, impulsive, and very American when she first arrives in the eccentric, self-sufficient, laid back community that captures her heart and energy. Despite a sense of constant "otherness" ... Read Review

Boiling A Frog, Christopher Brookmyre

The 3rd in the Jack Parlabane series, the audio of this book kept mildly freaking me out. Originally published in 2000, the political satire, the social commentary, and the sheer breathtaking bloody awfulness of the "powers that be" could be right now. So right now, that it was freaky, distracting, unbelievably disappointing, hilariously funny, scarily on topic, and scathing in it's portrayal of the Catholic Church in all it's pestilence, politician's in all their connivance, and political minders in all their brutality of purpose (and the utter lack of ethics, morals, decency and I ... Read Review

Criminals, James O'Loghlin

Into the crime fiction reader's life something different should lob more often. CRIMINALS is not only different, it's brilliantly different.

Well known ABC presenter James O'Loghlin has taken his inspiration for this novel from his time as a criminal lawyer, and told the tale in a laid back, yet funny and compassionate style. There's a fine line being teetered on here, with three seemingly ordinary people being flung into each other's orbits as a result of one act, revealing more and more about those people as the story progresses. The humour is always there, but it's ... Read Review

Death at the Belvedere, Sue Williams

The fourth book in the Cass Tuplin mystery series, set in the dryland farming areas of Victoria, somewhere sort of north west of Bendigo (I think), in the fictional town of Rusty Bore, with a takeaway that always makes me think of Wycheproof. (There's nothing whatsoever in these books that makes you think Rusty Bore is anything other than completely fictional and I've no idea why that's been in my head since the opening novel..., but I digress.)

Which I think is probably encouraged by reading the Cass Tuplin series - she of (as it turns out in this novel), "a lot of ... Read Review