The second fiction book from New Zealand writer, Gigi Fenster, A GOOD WINTER is a story of a group of women, after Lara moves to the city to be near her widowed, pregnant daughter. Sophie really starts to struggle after Michael is born, her grief compounded by post-natal depression. The...Read more
J.P. Pomare won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel with his debut CALL ME EVIE. Since then he's carved out a name for himself when it comes to precisely plotted, atmospheric, tense psychological thrillers populated by cleverly constructed characters, designed to keep readers...Read more
The debut novel in a series featuring Cesare Aldo, former soldier, now an officer in the city's most feared criminal court, CITY OF VENGEANCE is set during the winter of 1536 in Florence, Italy. At that time Florence was a wealthy and influential city, ruled over by the Duke Alessandro de...Read more
WAKING THE TIGER is set in 1939 Singapore. Dripping with sense of place and time, there's something vaguely reminiscent of Chandler's styling, and the excellent Inspector Le Fanu series by Brian Stoddart in the characterisation and plot.
Inspector Maximo Betancourt is working a...Read more
I've gotten a bit out of wack, but I think TO KILL A CONMAN is the third in the Quake City Investigations series (following on from SHOOTING MESSENGERS and THE POSSUM FUR PLOT). Either way it didn't matter, having read the first this one just flowed on, with central character PI Danny...Read more
DYING GRASS MOON is the 2nd book in the Hennessey Reed Mystery Series, following on from ONE FOR ANOTHER. Set in the early 1800's in Idaho in the USA, Hennessy Reed is a bordello madam, amateur sleuth, hidden mother, astounding woman and an absolute force to be reckoned with.
...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
A sequel to THE GENTLEMEN'S CLUB and THE VANISHING ACT, THE FINAL CALL is set in 1979 (10 or so years after THE VANISHING ACT) located in Remuera New Zealand, where Rita Saunders is the boss at The Gentlemen's Club, a high class brothel. Rita's more than a madam to her girls though, and the...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
The 3rd book in the Hunter Grant series, FOLDED sees Hunter and Dao reluctantly pulled into the darkweb and dangerous human traffickers.
After office-worker Grace finds a series of calls for help, folded in tiny origami shapes, dropped outside a high-rise city apartment...Read more
Alice Atkinson is back, laid up with an injured ankle and mildly bored. When her friend, and fellow resident of Silvermoon Retirement Centre, Owen asks for her help with his wayward granddaughter who has gotten herself into a spot of trouble. Nothing compared to the trouble she's going to...Read more
Set in small-town New Zealand, Boy Fallen is beautifully written and elegantly plotted crime fiction.
Auckland Detective Brooke Palmer returns to her home town of Taonga to support her best friend Lana when the body of Lana’s teenage son is found at the base of...Read more
The fourth novel in the Fiji Islands Mysteries series, DEATH SENTENCE is slower, more measured, and reflective than the earlier entries, which makes sense, given the subject matter.
For those new to the series, it's based around the investigative team of DI Joe Horseman, a...Read more
SPRIGS by Brannavan Gnanalingam is a searing expose of white, male privilege and the brazen underpinning of enablement and support that seemingly encourages, and if required, covers-up the actions of young men. Trigger Warning: It's about a gang rape, young men and an even younger victim....Read more
NZ-based Charity Norman’s sixth novel is her second to be shortlisted for Best Crime Novel in the Ngaio Marsh Awards. Full review at Newtown Review of Books...Read more
The winner of the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award for Younger Readers, KATIPO JOE is an almost pitch perfect vehicle for older kids (12+) to get some insights into the reality of war, and how identity can come with consequences, and loyalty is hard.
A 12 year old New Zealand boy living...Read more
In the middle of reading this novel an Antiques Roadshow episode popped up that included an old tally stick, bought in by an elderly gentleman who had kept it in a drawer for many years. Very useful and timely to be reminded that they were used as an aid to memory, often for financial or...Read more
The second novel in the RJ Rox series, THE FESTIVAL KILLER is a crime novel, with a rejected manuscript at its heart. The connection between the past unsolved case of an ambassador's secret love child going missing at the Berlin Book Festival, and subsequent disappearances from similar book...Read more
THE SNOW THIEF is set in Tibet, with a Chinese Detective as it's central character, fighting her bosses for permission to look into the mysterious deaths of multiple little boys. It's a story of murder, a serial killer, stalking the entire country, obviously killing to a pattern, but it's...Read more
Magical realism in a disturbing political thriller, told in a confessional first person voice, SHAKTI is not the sort of novel that you'd normally expect to show up in the list for a crime fiction award, but if the Ngaio Marsh Award has shown me anything over recent years it's to expect the...Read more
It increasingly feels like the things you can be guaranteed of when starting a new book by J.P. Pomare are it's going to be a fast paced, high tension thriller; it's likely as not going to frighten the daylights out of you; and it's going to be littered with twists, turns, red herrings,...Read more
Another book from the Ngaio Marsh list of 2021 that feels like the start of a series. This one is set north-west of Sydney, Australia, featuring park ranger Cal Nyx, who finds a badly decomposed body in the bush. Identification shows the body to be that of somebody she once knew, and Cal...Read more
DARK EMPIRE is an historical mystery novel, with at it's core, characters created by Katherine Mansfield:
"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...Read more
ONE LITTLE LIE is targeted at the upper age limit of YA readers, a suspense novel, that sees four friends, Melissa, Katrina, Belinda and Alison working the Christmas Holidays on Melissa's uncle's tomato farm on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. The girls are hoping for a classic university...Read more
Started reading this novella (133 pages or thereabouts) and really did, for the shortest time, wonder what on earth I'd started. THE STONE WĒTĀ isn't your normal enviro-thriller, oh boy is it not your normal enviro-thriller.
"With governments denying climate science, scientists...Read more
The blurb puts it best - "DANCE PRONE is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal." For many who were around in the mid 1980's, immersed in the counter culture of hard-core post-punk, indie rock with its wildness and weirdness, there are going to be bells ringing,...Read more
1973, from art school to shared housing in run-down Leeds, and Jude (aka Toto) is a chaotic, wild child, living a reckless, slightly crazy life, thoroughly enjoying her youth, blissfully unconnected with the news of random attacks on woman that keep showing up on the news.
What...Read more