The Hitwoman's Guide to Reducing Household Debt

I met my husband on the same day I committed my very last murder. There's a joke in there somewhere, about ending two men's lives.'

Olivia Hodges used to do horrible things - back when she worked for a Spanish crime syndicate - but she fled that life and moved home to Australia...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

Burning Mountain

Five went up. Only four came down . . .

In April 2006, fifteen-year-old Oliver went hiking to the lookout on Burning Mountain - and vanished without trace.

His schoolfriends – Bob, Bell, Phil and Paul – were the last ones to see him on the...Read more

Can You See Her?

What would you do if no-one was watching?

Rachel is afraid she may have done something terrible. She’s sitting in a room, being asked whether she killed someone.

She doesn’t understand how her life has changed so completely. When...Read more

The Girl She Was Before

Nat lives a picture-perfect life, but it wasn’t always this way. A victim of horrific bullying when she was a teenager, Nat will do anything to keep distance between the girl she was before and the woman she is now.

But when her best friend is murdered and people begin to point...Read more

She's A Killer

The world’s climate is in crisis and New Zealand is being divided and reshaped by the arrival of privileged immigrant wealthugees.

Thirty-something Alice has a near-genius IQ and lives at home with her mother with whom she communicates by Morse code. Alice’s imaginary friend,...Read more

Mila and the Bone Man

Straddling old world and new, Mila and the Bone Man explores the corrosive power of guilt, the solace to be found in the natural world, and our capacity to heal as well as hurt.

Set in the forest in northern New Zealand, Mila is a young woman descended from healers. A family...Read more

Double Jeopardy

Frank Winter is an ex-cop, a former hard-boiled Boston detective with a soft centre living in curmudgeonly retirement with his beloved dog, Dolly. But when his daughter's killer is released on parole, Frank's back, a man on a mission, and it's yesterday once more. But first, Frank's got a...Read more

The Defiance of Frances Dickinson

A woman who braved public disgrace to expose a brutal marriage.

1838, England: When eighteen-year-old heiress Frances Dickinson impulsively marries Lieutenant John Geils, she soon discovers there is much about her husband she did not know. A cruel and violent man, John keeps...Read more

Duck Season Death

June Wright wrote this lost gem in the mid-1950s, but consigned it to her bottom drawer after her publisher foolishly rejected it. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time? Because while it’s a tour de force of the classic country-house murder mystery, it’s also a delightful romp, poking...Read more

The Strength of Eggshells

New Zealand literary fiction with a part historical setting.

Kate sets out on a motorbike to find her past. Why does her mother Jane only communicate through poetry? What became of her grandmother Meredith who travelled up the Whanganui River on a paddle steamer to marry a...Read more

Toto Amongst the Murderers

It is 1973 and Jude - known to her friends as Toto - has just graduated from art school and moves into a house in a run-down part of Leeds. Jude is a chaotic wild child who flirts with the wrong kind of people, drinks too much and gets stoned too often. Never happy to stay in one place for...Read more

Beyond Year Zero

A  gritty, pacey crime thriller set in the dark heart of Cambodia.

Cambodia – seething hotbed of desperation and vice. The Khmer Rouge fighters are long dead but their murderous legacy has left a population gripped by violence. Into this cauldron of psychosis and trauma steps...Read more

Not Bad People

Three friends, thirty years of shared secrets, one impulsive gesture .. and a terrible accident. When friendship goes bad, someone has to pay. For fans of Liane Moriarty and Robyn Harding.

It's New Year's Eve. Three thirty-something women - Aimee, Melinda and Lou - best friends...Read more

The Wild Card

"Sure thirty years is a long time. Sure the case was closed. Well, never really a case as such. Fifteen-year-old brown girl tops herself, who cares? Turn the page. That bloody notebook, thought Club. God knows what was in it. Who knew that little bitch could even write?"

Ruby...Read more

The Final Call

It’s 1979. Auckland is on the brink. Fashion and music are bursting through previous boundaries but prostitution is still illegal and male homosexuality is still a crime.  Who is out to destroy Carmel O’Sullivan and her sister Tess, top call-girls in Rita Saunders’ gentlemen’s club? Is Tess embroiled in the heroin trade that has recently thrust New Zealand’s underbelly onto the world stage for the first time?Read more

Golden Days

Becky thought she'd left Zoe and that summer far behind.

Set in 1995 against the backdrop of Auckland's burgeoning party scene, Golden Days is the story of an intense late-teens friendship between bookish Becky Chalke and star-dusted Zoe Golden, and what happens after one...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

Welcome to Bellevue

“Welcome to Bellevue, where the mountains meet the sea…”

Harry awakes on a ferry with no memory of how he came to be there. The boat is bound for Bellevue, a place he has never heard of. When he goes ashore, his attempts to leave are thwarted.

Feeling trapped and...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

Boy Fallen

A POWERFUL CRIME MYSTERY WITH A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY AT ITS CORE

When the body of wealthy teen and aspiring photographer Evan Wiley is found faceup at the base of Taonga Falls, one thing is immediately clear: he didn’t jump.

Detective Brooke Palmer...Read more

Secrets of the Land

Imogen Maguire is bewildered when in 2018 she is accosted in a Melbourne Street by a mysterious stranger who says her grandfather in New Zealand needs her help. But her grandfather is dead, isn’t he? A former journalist, Imogen decides to investigate and travels to Taranaki where she finds...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

To The Sea

Keep a secret. Tell a lie. Protect the family. At all costs.

A compulsively readable suspense thriller from Ngaio Marsh Award shortlisted author, Nikki Crutchley, which will keep you guessing and reading up until late into the night....Read more

Nikolai's Quest

How do you move forward if you don’t know where you started?

Russia 1996

11-year-old Nikolai and his 9-year-old sister, Anna, have lived most of their lives in an orphanage, built inside a 300-year-old former monastery. Their city has changed its name from...Read more

Emergency Weather

"Everything felt wrong, everywhere. The floor was at a weird angle – he took one step and staggered sideways against the wall. Was that shudder the house moving again?"

Zeke has to stay with his aunt and uncle in Lower Hutt after a landslide takes his East Coast home off its...Read more

Dance Prone

1985. Neus Bauen, a post-hardcore band from Illinois, are touring America, on the brink of fame. When one member of the band is sexually assaulted and another is wounded by a gunshot, these two cataclysmic events alter the course of the band’s four members’ lives forever.

...Read more

Isobar Precinct

A chain of events sparked by a murder in a cemetery sends tattoo artist Lestari Cassidy into the orbit of an unpredictable drug.

Its connection to several deaths amongst the local transient community, along with the uncovering of illegal clinical trials in the 1980s, sends her...Read more

Nor’East Swell

Eighteen-year-old Witi’s father is listed as having abandoned his family and that’s just how Witi sees it. But when he is on his surfboard, feeling the surge of the sea, he somehow feels close to him. He also knows his rock-star father was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and lately Witi has...Read more

We Only Want What’s Best

A long-haul flight. Two ambitious dance mums. A child in danger.

Bridget and Simone aren’t friends. But their daughters are in the same dance troupe, so they’re flying to Los Angeles for the girls to perform at Disneyland. Simone’s daughter Zahra is indisputably a leader in the...Read more

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