Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and overseas readers and publishers looking more and more to tales from lands Down Under.
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When single mother Alex flees her abusive relationship and moves with her teenage son and baby girl to a rural ecovillage, she thinks she’s made the best decision of her life. Pine Ridge is idyllic: the off-grid lifestyle and remote location are perfect, and the community is welcoming –...Read more
Where is the mail order bride?
Summer 2019 in New Zealand. On the last day of a backpacking holiday, Kate loses her bag on a vineyard tour and misses her flight home to England. An eccentric elderly man comes to her rescue and invites her to stay on as his paid...Read more
'It's not exactly how I imagined the week starting. An accessory to murder. On the run in the victim's vehicle . . .'
Charlie and Nao are strangers from different sides of the tracks. They should never have met, but one devastating incident binds them together forever....Read more
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
Family law judge Kaye Bailey is found murdered in her chambers. Is this the work of a disgruntled complainant? Or an inside job by a jealous colleague? Or is there something even more insidious at the heart of this brutal act?
Detective Jillian Basset is just back from...Read more
The story kicks off in 1960 Los Angeles, with the daring kidnapping of the child of one of America's richest men. It then darts back and forth between a private detective's urgent search for the child, the saga of a notorious hit man in the days leading to JFK's assasination, and the modern...Read more
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her...Read more
Australia can no longer be held back from the Akashic Noir Series; herein, Sydney reveals itself to be a world-class hub of noir.
Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all...Read more
A missing girl ... a cold case ... a sister who won’t give up …
'I was there on the day Rebecca disappeared. I watched her hurry away. If I close my eyes I can still see her...'
When Rebecca Bundy fails to return home after the last day of school in 1984 her father...Read more
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
David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb...Read more
The fourth in Dark Passage’s reissue series of crime mysteries by June Wright, The Devil’s Caress , originally published in 1952, is an tense psychological thriller set on the wild southern coast of the Mornington Peninsula, outside Melbourne.Read more
It’s 1918, in a Wellington that few people would recognise today, and two major events are about to the signing of the Armistice to end World War I, and the soldier-borne plague we now call the Spanish flu. Into this comes Wellington's only female lawyer, leading her group of Sapphist...Read more
Saunas, love and a ladleful of murder...
A cold-blooded killer strikes at the hottest the head of a sauna-heater company is murdered ... in the sauna. Who has turned up the temperature and burned him to death?
The evidence points in the direction of...Read more
On a balmy June night, Kirsten, a young university student, is strolling home through a silent moonlit park when she is viciously attacked.
When she awakens in the hospital, she has no recollection of that brutal night. But then slowly, painfully, details reveal themselves—dreams...Read more
Young, pretty Junko Aoki has an extraordinary ability; she can start fires through sheer force of will. When she begins using her gift of pyrokinesis to take the law into her own hands and punish violent criminals, her executions attract the attention of two very different groups: the...Read more
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story...Read more
Elisabeth is a picture restorer. This gives her the solitude and independence she needs - living and working alone in her flat. Despite her skills and reliability, Elizabeth undercharges for her work - valuing the worth of the paintings rather more than herself. Her ambitions are modest:...Read more
Hans Bengler, a young entomologist, leaves Sweden for the Kalahari Desert, determined to find a previously undiscovered insect to name after himself and advance his career. Instead, he finds a young boy, whose tribe has been decimated by European raiders. Accustomed to collecting specimens...Read more
Tim's stuff is disappearing and not just little stuff - things like his wardrobe and clothes. When he and his best mate set up a sting to catch the thieves, he is amazed to discover it's his parents!Read more
It was the largest bank robbery in Australian history. On Sunday 14 September 1828, thieves tunnelled through a sewage drain into the vault of Sydney's Bank of Australia and stole 14 000 in notes and cash - the equivalent of $20 million in today's currency. This audacious group of convicts...Read more
Absolute Zero Cool is a post-modern take on the crime thriller genre.
Adrift in the half-life limbo of an unpublished novel, hospital porter Billy needs to up the stakes. Euthanasia simply isn’t shocking anymore; would blowing up his hospital be enough to see Billy...Read more
A man is washed up on a deserted beach on the Hebridean Isle of Harris, barely alive and borderline hypothermic. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his identity is a map tracing a track called the Coffin Road. He does not know where it will lead him, but filled...Read more
Hidden in the outback, somewhere near Ecstasy Lake, is a massive gold deposit worth billions of dollars.
Steve West, mining engineer and ex-AFL footballer, is the third person to know about it. The second is his good mate Tasso - loud, brilliant, filthy rich and just possibly mad...Read more
It’s impossible for a man to be killed three times … isn’t it?
Sydney, 1959
When Detective Inspector Herbert Swinton is called in to investigate the murder of William Flecker at a sophisticated house party, there’s no shortage of suspects. A well-known writer and...Read more
The title alone tells us that someone has died. We know that the girl who came before is going to exert an influence on the present-day protagonist; someone’s footsteps are going to be walked in once again. So how did the girl before come to her end?
Present day Jane is...Read more
A romantic mystery set at a beautiful lake in the South Island of New Zealand. Andrea North is looking forward to a job at Lake Waihola as a way to escape from a man who tried to control her life, but an easy task is soon complicated by a house with a secret hoard, dead birds, and a close...Read more
His bestselling author has vanished, he’s under surveillance, and a killer is trying to hack bits off his wife. It’s not easy being a publisher in the 21st century...
Samuel Verso is an ordinary, old-fashioned publisher trying to resist the lure of e-books. As his wife fills the...Read more
Paula is a dedicated suburban GP, who is devastated by the murder of a friend and her children by their estranged husband and father. Stacey and the children had been staying with her after fleeing his control, and Paula is haunted by the thought that she couldn't protect them when they...Read more