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
When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.
There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly...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
Jason Ginaff doesn’t get out much. Partly because of the anxiety, mainly because he works at home. Researching people on the internet. Job candidates doing bucket bongs on Instagram accounts they thought they’d deleted; the prospective new head of sales stripping for a hens’ night…...Read more
Is there really such a thing as an innocent person?
Teachers, cops, mothers, wives, everyone has their breaking point; that moment where it could go either way. From the prostitute with no way out, to the bitter author, and a cop who just wants his leave, the characters in this...Read more
You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you.
You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty.
Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why.
College life had seemed like...Read more
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
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 latest work from acclaimed historical author Robert Cox, A Compulsion to Kill is a dramatic chronological account of 19th-century Tasmanian serial murderers. Never before revealed in such depth, the story is the culmination of extensive research and adept craftsmanship as it probes the...Read more
English writer Paul D Brazill's 13 Shots Of Noir is a collection of short stories in the vein of Roald Dahl, The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The first story, "The Tut", was nominated for a 2010 Spinetingler Award, while the story "Anger Management" was chosen as one of the...Read more
Perfect isolation. No phones. No neighbors. No help.Read more
When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer with the CIA in...Read more
Can you commit the perfect crime?
Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on...Read more
A literary detective story ingeniously told in ten cases. John Dorn is a classic gumshoe. His woman has left him, he lives in his office, and he drinks too much. His one friend, a lawyer named Demetri, hands Dorn an infinite supply of hopeless cases and lost causes, to which Dorn, ever the...Read more
C.R.O.P.: Covert Rural Observation Posts are places where men like Danny 'Badger' Baxter hide for endless, motionless hours, secretly recording criminal or terrorist activity.
But now Badger has a bigger job than photographing dissident Republicans in muddy Ulster fields or...Read more
It should have all been so easy for Vincent Madigan. Take four hundred grand from the thieves who stole it in the first place and who could they turn to for help?
Madigan is charming, resourceful, and knows how to look after himself. The only problem is that he's up to his neck...Read more
Since its appearance nearly two centuries ago, crime fiction has gripped readers' imaginations around the world. Detectives have varied enormously: from the nineteenth-century policemen (and a few women), through stars like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, to newly self-aware voices of the...Read more
Susan and Ed Middleton are perfectly content with their lives. Two kids, two cars, a solid brick bungalow in a respectable northern beaches suburb. They're good people, model citizens. There's barely a ripple in the surface of their happy existence. But when Susan's older sister, who...Read more
These are tales of fugitive lives: dazzling portraits of women and men on the run; from their present, their past, their future – from themselves…
Here, finally, is the complete collection of short fiction from award-winning author Wendy James. Holding a discerning mirror to...Read more
Stephen Knight's book is a full analytic survey of crime fiction from its origins in the 19th century to the most contemporary developments. Knight explains how and why the various forms of the genre evolved, explores major authors and movements, and argues that the genre as a whole has...Read more
When a woman is kidnapped and her husband refuses to pay the ransom, she plans her revenge with the help of her kidnappers. She frames her husband for her "murder" in this clever tale of redemption. A contemporary, fast-paced thriller, A Decent Ransom blends pathos with trickery and...Read more
Set in the current art scene in a fictitious Sydney Art Gallery where Tom is employed as a security guard a well publicised Rembrandt exhibition is under threat from a daring international art thief. One of Australia's foremost mystery-thriller writers, Tom Howard succeeds in foiling the...Read more
As a child, Ali Neuman narrowly escaped being murdered by Inkatha, a militant political party at war with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. His father and brother were not so lucky. Only he and his mother survived the carnage of those years. But as with many survivors, the...Read more
Val McDermid, Reginald Hill, and Peter James are just some of the 24 top selling crime writers who have contributed stories to Criminal Tendencies, an exciting new crime short collection. Alongside the big names will be stories from first-time authors Chris Nickson and Caroline Shiach,...Read more