We took a couple of weeks off over Christmas / New Year and spent the time driving around in the new car (working out how to drive it / charge it / where the cup holders are - all that sort of stuff), and managed a couple of days of long meanders with the dogs when it wasn't hot enough to melt concrete. Also did some reading - some of which was catchup / some f2f bookclub and some, just because. All of them are marked as review to come as it'll take me a little while to tick off the general admin / email backlog / what was I doing before the break work stuff.

It's not going to take a genius to figure out I've not been "blogging" much here in recent times. Ran out of puff, nothing worth saying, thousands of reasons - mostly came down to couldn't be bothered to be honest. But a quick note to say yep, have deleted both twitter accounts @kcfromaustcrime and @auscrimefiction

Moved to Mastodon. Couldn't have made a better decision. Social Media as it's supposed to be done.

Fresh voices came to the fore at WORD Christchurch Spring Festival on Saturday afternoon as Becky Manawatu and RWR McDonald were named the winners of the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Both winners were first-time novelists, and while their winning books were different in many ways, each was told in large part from the perspective of young children dealing with loss and violence in small-town New Zealand, each included a rich cast of diverse characters, and each expertly blended lighter moments with dark events in tense tales that could make readers gasp and laugh.

Two men.
One woman.
A blood feud.
The birth of the Italian mafia in Australia.

Join now and start reading the exclusive "Isolation Edition"

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The Calabrian will be published in August but you can be one of the first to read this pulsating novel by signing up for our "isolation edition" You get access to a new chapter of the book each day. Waiting for the next instalment will only heighten your expectation and anticipation as the story develops.

As everyone has heard Michael Robotham's THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS is now a TV show on Channel 10 https://10play.com.au/the-secrets-she-keeps 

On Monday 2 March The Australian Publishers Association announced the 2020 ABIA longlist. The longlist introduces the titles, publishers and authors in the running for the 2020 ABIA. And what a list it is! Check it out below. 

MEDIA RELEASE

The debut literary crime novel by former ABC current affairs broadcaster Annette Marner, A New Name for the Colour Blue, is influenced by her decades of reporting on male violence towards women and girls. Set between Adelaide and the southern Flinders Ranges, it won the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2018.

The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings

Media Release

The debut novel from Jennifer Rosner, The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully moving and utterly gripping tale that will be released on 25 February 2020.

On 11 February 2020, Jenny Quintana will release her second novel Our Dark Secret; an emotional and gripping tale of two girls, two deaths and two decades of silence.

Following the success of her debut novel, The Missing Girl, the anticipated second novel follows Elizabeth, a teenager in the late 1970s who was clever, overweight and the perfect victim for bullies.

A chance encounter with a mysterious girl in the summer of 1978 solidifies the collision of two fates when Rachel moved to town with her family at the start of the school year.