All the Reviews

Franz Josef, Alan Carter

The third book now in the Nick Chester series set in New Zealand, this is a police procedural that uses sense of place and great characters as it's starting point, drawing them into nicely twisty plots that rely heavily on location to give them that little extra something.

The FRANZ JOSEF from the novel's title refers to a tiny South Island town which was built right on top of New Zealand's Alpine Fault, making it particularly vulnerable to devastating earthquakes, floods and landslides. It's also very exposed to the ravages of climate change, being a tourist town, that ... Read Review

The Redline, Adrian Hyland

A book that was pitch perfect for over the festive season reading. Set in the fictional location of the Windmark Ranges (not too hard to figure out the basis for them though), it's Christmas, and the drunks, troublemakers and idiots are out in force. Nothing unusual then, until the death of Sergeant Jesse Redpath's much admired and loved colleague up on the road known as the Redline, dealing on his own, with yet more idiots hooning about the place.

The death of that lone cop though isn't as straightforward as it seems, and the more Redpath digs, the more unexplained ... Read Review

Turning Point, Wayne Andrewartha

The opening salvo in a new detective series based around Jake Shaw, TURNING POINT is set in the US, written by a Kiwi author and published by a New Caledonian based company. Which unlikely series of events has come together to create a multi-threaded thriller styled novel with some very topical plot threads.

Starting out with the story of Tommy Sessions, who leaves jail after serving 3 years for his part in an armed robbery, morphing on the way out into William Brass, the leader of an reclusive religious sect who, on the face of it seem peaceful enough, but the ... Read Review

Death of a Diplomat, B.M. Allsopp

The sixth novel now in the Fiji Islands Mystery series, DEATH OF A DIPLOMAT has a lot of twists and turns in the personal sides of the lives of DI Joe Horseman and his team. Because of that you really would be best to dip into the series a tad earlier than this one, just to get a taste for the day to day life of a Fijian Police DI, and the sorts of cases that he and his team have to deal with. To say nothing of an unsupportive, mildly bats boss, and Horseman's beloved Junior Shiners rugby team.

Rugby looms largish in these storylines as Horseman was a very famous Fijian ... Read Review

Dinner at the Night Library, Hika Harada

Can't remember quite how this novel piqued my interest, but I do love whimsical, gentle Japanese crime fiction and the library had a copy so...

First up, this was a fabulous read, full of whimsy and gentle humour, with a fantabulous setup: a library that only opens after dark, never allows patrons to check books out, and consists entirely of the collections of books that were once owned by now deceased Japanese authors. 

The employees are also an eclectic set of people - former booksellers and librarians who have had rocky past careers, all of whom have come ... Read Review

Ōkiwi Brown, Cristina Sanders

Cristina Sanders is a new to me author who has written a number of books in the past along the same lines of ŌKIWI BROWN - a fictionalised version of historical events that incorporate early tales (tall and true) of Aotearoa. This story is told in a series of anecdotes, incorporating the story of a man, a waler who washed up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson many years ago, in the early days of colonial settlement. He sets himself up with a pub and makes a home with a woman found abandoned on the nearby beach, quickly developing a reputation for evil and nasty going's on.  ... Read Review

No Less the Devil, Stuart MacBride

Fans of Stuart MacBride's novels will be particularly familiar with the way that he likes to keep his police characters, in particular, at the end of their tether, under pressure from all sides, and frequently having a bit of a dummy spit by way of a coping mechanism.

NO LESS THE DEVIL starts out with a couple of very young teenagers killing a homeless man, then switches focus to a current day police team, and the search for a serial killer, dubbed 'The Bloodsmith', with two members of the team looking for him as the main focus. DS Lucy McVeigh and her colleague DC Duncan ... Read Review

Pacific Heights, S.R. White

The author bio for S.R. White reads thus:

S.R. White worked for a UK police force for twelve years, before returning to academic life and taking an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He now lives in Queensland, Australia.

He's the author of the Dana Russo series (HERMIT / PRISONER / RED DIRT ROAD and WHITE ASH RIDGE), and now this standalone, PACIFIC ... Read Review

Entitled, Andrew Lownie

I don't know why I read this, but I guess these two have been in the news again recently, I have Virginia Roberts Giuffre's book on the stacks, and I realised I knew next to nothing about Andrew or his ex-wife, other than the occasional bit of gossip that passes as news. Which I kind of suspected this book might turn out to be, or even worse, a massive attempt at reputation restoration.

It was neither. Mostly it's politely scathing, although I could have done without the little bit of motivation explanation - mostly on her part at the end, although to be fair, it was ... Read Review