Cold Wallet

'You have kind eyes.' The last words Andrew said to Jess just before he died on their honeymoon. Grief stricken, she returns to New Zealand and to the cryptocurrency exchange he left her in his will. Knowing nothing about cryptocurrency, Jess, a physician, turns to Andrew's associate, Henry...Read more

Scare Me To Death

A homemade bomb exploded mid-air, killing 214 people on board. Thirteen people survived.

Sixteen years later one of the survivors is found brutally bludgeoned to death. It looks like a crime of passion but DC Lucy Davies knows something is wrong. They were trying to find the...Read more

Winter's Death

A murdered author. Six suspects. Who’s next?

Lexie discovers the body of bestselling crime novelist, Beth Weaver, and finds herself at the top of the inspector’s suspect list.

Top of Lexie’s list are the three couples who are Beth’s only neighbours on the isolated...Read more

Poor People With Money

Monday Woolridge is a fighter with a face covered in scars and life full of debt.

Her Avondale flat has no furniture, her father’s dead, her catatonic mother’s in an expensive nursing home and her kickboxing gym is going to Thailand.
Monday's shitty bartending job pays...Read more

If That's What It Takes

1982, New Zealand. Sean McBride, an unlicensed private investigator living under a false identity, forms an unlikely alliance with small town lawyer Jim Mansell and his unconventional secretary Kelly.

Fighting against dirty tricks from Northland rugby fields to dusty courtrooms...Read more

Sleeper Agent

In the sleepy town of Gainesville, Cooper Fox is a beloved local figure with a mind clouded by amnesia from a devastating car accident. But a chance encounter with three menacing strangers shatters the image of Cooper as a gentle guy with a foggy past, leaving the town of Gainesville to...Read more

The Democracy Game

Populist political parties are increasing their influence across the world. It couldn’t happen in New Zealand, could it?

Journalist Grace Marks is investigating two unrelated stories – New Zealand’s alt-right, and the emergence of a new organisation, ProtectNZ. When she finds ‘...Read more

Bunny

Two eyes bore into him from across the room. They're not her eyes. They're the same colour and shape, but they're not her eyes.

'I see you.'

Silas didn't have a happy childhood. Aunt Bunny made sure of that. But out of money and almost...Read more

No One Will Know

They’re the perfect couple. They have the perfect plan. All they need is the perfect victim.

Julia and Christopher Hygate have the picture-perfect Gobs of money thanks to their lucrative shipping enterprise, an estate on a secluded island, and a baby on the way.

...Read more

Prize Catch

A quest for the truth becomes a race for survival in this pacy new crime novel from award-winning author Alan Carter.

When Roz Chen's wife, Niamh, is killed in a hit-and-run on a lonely Tasmanian road, the grieving widow begins to wonder if Niamh's death was an...Read more

The Hitchhiker

The Driver:

Ahead he could see only the stretch of unending road, on either side brown-scorched plains of dirt and scrub, above it all a soaring blue sky and blinding sun. Desolation that looked, to him, a hell of a lot like freedom. He wasn’t playing by anyone’s rules anymore....Read more

Safekeeping

Rebecca Eaton has the sort of job you don’t talk about at parties. She’s a lawyer for children, a defender of the defenceless, a voice for the voiceless. At times, she even needs to protect parents from themselves.

It’s grim work, but the law is there to protect people, right?...Read more

The False Inspector Dew

The year is 1921. A passionate affair between voracious romance reader Alma Webster and her dentist, Walter Baranov, has led to his wife’s murder. The lovers take flight aboard the Mauretania and the dentist takes the name of Inspector Dew, the detective who arrested the notorious...Read more

A History of Crime: The Southern Double-Cross

The most dangerous people are those with the most to lose.

It is 1887. The young colony of New Zealand is in the grip of a deep depression. Insolvent speculators conspire with corrupt politicians while Maori land slips from the hands of its owners.

Into this...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

Cars & Girls

Bad things happen. Everybody dies. But the girl in the red dress kicks against the pricks. Four merciless and compelling stories by emerging writers from Canada, the UK, and USA.

From behind the wheel of her father's lovingly restored Barracuda, a waitress will protect her baby...Read more

Angkor Tears

Cambodia, a country with so many shadows in its past. Now there are new shadows. Someone is killing children and leaving no clues. It’s enough to draw journalist Dave Bell back to Cambodia after a plea from an old friend. Bell puts together an unlikely team of allies and together they begin...Read more

Bridget's Locket and Other Mysteries

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"The sun had set away behind Willamstown, but the red glow was still there, and lay like a shadow of blood on the placid waters of our bay."

Murder, love, courage. This triptych of nineteenth-century thrillers by Mary Helena Fortune, writing as Waif Wander, encompasses colonial...Read more

Between the Stops

This long-awaited memoir from one of Britain's best-loved celebrities - a writer, broadcaster, activist, comic on stage, screen and radio for nearly forty years, presenter of QI and Great British Bake Off star - is an autobiography with a difference: as only Sandi...Read more

Dead Man Singing

Could a rock-star's first big hit have predicted his death.

Landing the major murder case of rock star Jim Munro was everything ambitious Detective Joni Johns could ask for. Having little patience for a female running the investigation, the remaining band members of We...Read more

The Fell

In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what seems like an idyllic life. He idolises his father who is a lifeguard at the local faded and peeling Lido, never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man. The boy comes to believe that heroism is all....Read more

Murder in the Midst

Eight different women. One thing in common: serious crime.

A cabinetmaker, private investigator, journalist, mystery lady, homemaker, police officer, true-crime writer and flavourist. Between them they witness, investigate, perpetrate and are victims of serious crime....Read more

Low Flying

Matt Bullock, an Auckland university student clashes with his flying instructor Jason Collins who tries to hit on Matt's racy girlfriend Fleur Lassiter, resulting in the two men brawling at their aeroclub.

Illegal immigrant Vladimir Zhukov, a ruthless Russian veteran of the...Read more

Hidden Killer

As a final year Law student Gilbert Hastings and Lucille Dellow take a holiday job to renovate the Old Stone House in Arbor Valley. The owner of the Old Stone House, Elsie Leggat has moved into a rest home and has been persuaded to sell her house by a corrupt Nadine Norton. Nadine has a...Read more

Neands

What if evolution got it wrong and the human race was threatened at the very core of its DNA? Charlie (14) is living in a time when a strange virus is affection sections of the Homosapien race. They are becoming more hostile, more aggressive. It seems there is a throwback to the Neand gene...Read more

Hell of a Thing

With his sixth collection of stories, this leading young New Zealand author and journalist finds purchase for the first time with an American publisher. In Hell of a Thing, a cowardly father seeks a more exciting son; two lovers on a posh date dine on self-delusion; and an author turns his...Read more

The Edge of Myself

A man on fire, a self-imposed lockdown and a badly timed love.

When introverted junior architect Estelle says no to the annual holiday, her family become even more disgruntled with her than usual. Choosing solitude over a five star, eight-week international trip means even co-...Read more

The Renegade Reporters

Ash and her friends are reporters. They were ready to lead their school news show, The News at Nine, sponsored by Van Ness Media, when an unfortunate incident involving a dancing teacher, an irresponsibly reported story, and a viral video got them kicked off the crew.

So Ash,...Read more

The Waterhole

When a backyard dare to discover the source of a fabled waterhole uncovers human bones, small town detective, Marley West, leaps at the chance to kickstart his stalled career. But it’s more than two decades since developers filled the Cowaramup creek. The woman who owned the land—the Ross...Read more

Kill Her

Zoe Herewini's treatment for her irrational behaviour threatens to reveal the killer of her sister. The killer must silence her.

Members of a protest group wish to kill the Prime Minister, Jennifer Allenby for imposing sanctions on people's freedoms during the Covid-19 pandemic...Read more

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