The Hidden Room

Life is good for Laurie and Martha. They have three great kids, a much-loved home in the countryside, and after years of struggle, Laura's career as an architect is taking off at last. Everything's perfect.

Except, it isn't.

Someone is about to walk into their...Read more

Humidity

Welcome to an Aussie town where the violence is rampant and the humidity’s hell

Ben doesn’t like being a nude model in a small country town. Then again, the local footballers don’t like their girlfriends ogling Ben.

Broke and desperately lonely, Ben...Read more

Birnam Wood

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards.Read more

The Pain Tourist

A young man wakes from a coma to find himself targeted by the men who killed his parents, while someone is impersonating a notorious New Zealand serial killer … the latest chilling, nerve-shredding, twisty thriller from the author of The Quiet People…

James Garrett was critically...Read more

The Nowhere Child

Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year old girl vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. She cannot...Read more

Double Lives

This established WA-based writer examines notions of truth, gender, identity and acceptance in a compelling novel about a cold-case podcast.

Truth is like a lens we apply to everything we see, it is malleable and transformative, we can bend it, mould it, shape it, vanish it. We...Read more

Traced

Jane is a contact tracer. She has to call a lot of people and some of them don’t want to talk. Various reasons—tax or immigration issues, infidelity. Domestic abuse.

Jane knows all about that. She and her daughter Tara have spent years in hiding from Tara’s manipulative and...Read more

Crossing the Lines

A successful writer, Madeleine, creates a character, Edward, and begins to imagine his life. He, too, is an author. Edward is in love with a woman, Willow, who's married to a man Edward loathes, and who loathes him, but he and Willow stay close friends. She's an artist. As Madeleine develops the plot, Edward attends a gallery show where a scummy critic is flung down a flight of fire stairs...murdered.Read more

Surveillance

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear ...

Journalist Grace Marks, needing a story to boost her career and finances, is intrigued by a surge in minor crime in New Zealand suburbs. She discovers it’s organised, but why?

Her investigations lead her to...Read more

Unsheltered

As the resourceful, relentless Li tracks her lost daughter across a disintegrating country, the journey will test the limits of her trust, her hope and her love. Unsheltered will leave you wrung out and gasping.

Relentlessly propulsive and profoundly moving, Unsheltered taps into...Read more

When We Fall

‘It isn’t strangers you need to worry about here. Blood lines run deep and in unexpected places. Every victim, every accused, we’ll know. The past runs alongside us all the time. Some days it spills into the open.’

In the wild, coastal town of Merritt, Alex Tillerson and her...Read more

A Decent Ransom

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

The War Photographers

1943 – Bletchley Park, England

Mae Webster, immersed in the clandestine world of codebreaking at Bletchley Park, is recruited to help unveil a spy who’s on the brink of exposing Britain's most guarded secret, the cracking of the Enigma code. As war rages...Read more

Hive of Lies

Fraud, dead bodies and manuka honey. Who knew accounting could be dangerous?!

Newly returned to Auckland, accountant Claire Conner thinks her first day on the job can’t get any worse- intimidating receptionist, torn skirt and a fire evacuation. Then she’s told her friend Anne...Read more

Where Have You Been?

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

Dark Empire

Katherine Mansfield created some of literature’s most chilling characters, not least Harry Kember and his wife. They seemed out of place among the families enjoying summer holidays at Wellington’s Days Bay. Some of the women at the Bay thought that one day Harry would commit a murder....Read more

A Murder Without Motive

In 2004, the body of a young Perth woman was found on the grounds of a primary school. Her name was Rebecca Ryle. The killing would mystify investigators, lawyers, and psychologists - and profoundly rearrange the life of the victim's family.

It would also involve the author's...Read more

Black Water Lilies

Giverny. During the day, tourists flock to the former home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his Water Lilies. But when silence returns, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village.

This is the story of thirteen days that begin with...Read more

Bearbrass

Just a little way down Collins Street, beside Henry Buck's, is a perpetually dark but sheltered laneway called Equitable Place. Here you'll find a number of places to eat and drink. Settle yourself in the window of one, shut your eyes, and picture this scene of yore ...In this much-loved...Read more

Welcome to Ord City

All refugees welcome in Australia!

In 2023, Australia reversed its closed border policy and said to the world: ‘Welcome! You are free to come to Australia, but you must spend the first seven years in the Temporary Citizenship Zone around the Ord River.’

Seven years...Read more

Broken Silence

A stranger just put Kelsey’s boyfriend in a coma. The worst part? She asked him to do it. 

Seventeen-year-old Kelsey is dealing with a lot – an abusive boyfriend, a gravely ill mother, an absent father, and a confusing new love interest. After her boyfriend attacks her in...Read more

A Year in the Southern Highlands

Widely acclaimed author Jackie French's journal of a year in the life of the Araluen Valley in the beautiful Southern Highlands of NSW. It's a combination of many stories - foxes in the autumn and the first of the asparagus, dashes to the school bus in the mornings and sleepy lizard...Read more

Born To Run

Isabel Diaz is set to be the first woman to win the White House. But her chances plummet when a Muslim protege is accused of syphoning funds to terrorists and, seemingly unrelated, an Australian software whizz is tossed off a London skyscraper. Then, when a TV journalist digs up a dark...Read more

Gangster Warlords

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a...Read more

Cooper Bartholomew Is Dead

Cooper Bartholomew's body is found at the foot of a cliff.

Suicide.

That's the official finding, that's what everyone believes. Cooper's girlfriend, Libby, has her doubts. They'd been happy, in love. Why would he take his own life?

As Libby searches...Read more

Bad Blood

Blood makes you related. Loyalty makes you family.

In the underbelly of Soho’s organized crime ring, everyone knows that retired boxer Harry Woods is not one to mess with. And that goes double for his family.

Harry has it all: the big house, the flashy...Read more

Only When I Die

Tate’s done his time for murder. Now he’s back, determined to find Kayla, the girl he was willing to kill for…

The girl who’s been missing since Tate was locked up eighteen years ago.

Trapped between worlds, Kayla’s body has long decayed, but her soul is desperate...Read more

Bright Air

She stood panting on the narrow ledge, pressing herself back against the hard surface of the rock . . . heard a voice, far below, calling her name. She tried to answer, but her throat was parched and no sound came. They had heard the stone, clattering down the cliff to the sea, and now...Read more

Pages