All the Reviews

When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, Geoff Parkes

WHEN THE DEEP DARK BUSH SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE is the first in the Ryan Bradley series (the second - THE FIRST LAW OF THE BUSH was released on 6/1/2026 prompting me to extract the digit and read this!), set in New Zealand's rugged and remote King Country, around the small town of Nashville. A community made up of people who have been there for generations, relying mostly on agriculture as the main economic driver, it's a quiet place, with the spectre of a series of disappearances of women hanging over it.

Set in 1983, the ... Read Review

Wrongdoings, L A Joye

An historical mystery set in 1943 New Zealand, featuring soon to be retired DI John MacBride, WRONGDOINGS is a book that's centred, unsurprisingly given the timeframe, around the fallout from war.

DI MacBride is a veteran of WWI service with the NZ Expeditionary Force, a man on the cusp of retirement, really suffering from severe burnout. The victim in this story, Marine Randolph Harrington, is a saxophonist in a visiting United States Marine jazz band, found murdered on the banks of the Oreti River. The investigation is a hard one, what with MacBride's only supporting ... Read Review

A Deadly Inheritance, Charlotte Vassell

A DEADLY INHERITANCE is the third book in the Caius Beauchamp series. The first two (THE OTHER HALF and THE IN CROWD) were most definitely crime fiction with a hefty side serving of "having a go at the uppercrust" and hugely enjoyably.Read Review

The Mall, Michael Armstrong

Whoever said "write what you know" to Michael Armstrong got their message through loud and clear. THE MALL is set in the world of high finance commercial real estate, and features the wheeling, dealing, and dodging goings on of that, as well as the life and times of an ambitious young Curtis Ryan.

The blurb is worth reading on this one, with the final paragraph worth using as the kicking off point for this review:

The Mall peels back the curtain on the hidden world of shopping centres and dives deep into the little-known domain of the

... Read Review

My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully, Karsten Dusse

The follow up novel to what was, frankly, one of the highlights of my reading 2025, MY INNER CHILD WANTS TO MURDER MINDFULLY comes after MURDER MINDFULLY which came out in 2024 from memory. That first novel has been made into a Netflix series which we watched - it works pretty well although obviously all the wondrous, sly, slightly mucky moments from the novel couldn't make it onto the screen. It's one of those series (so far) that would really benefit from reading from the start because frankly, how it got to what happens in the ... Read Review

Franz Josef, Alan Carter

The third book now in the Nick Chester series set in New Zealand, this is a police procedural that uses sense of place and great characters as it's starting point, drawing them into nicely twisty plots that rely heavily on location to give them that little extra something.

The FRANZ JOSEF from the novel's title refers to a tiny South Island town which was built right on top of New Zealand's Alpine Fault, making it particularly vulnerable to devastating earthquakes, floods and landslides. It's also very exposed to the ravages of climate change, being a tourist town, that ... Read Review

The Redline, Adrian Hyland

A book that was pitch perfect for over the festive season reading. Set in the fictional location of the Windmark Ranges (not too hard to figure out the basis for them though), it's Christmas, and the drunks, troublemakers and idiots are out in force. Nothing unusual then, until the death of Sergeant Jesse Redpath's much admired and loved colleague up on the road known as the Redline, dealing on his own, with yet more idiots hooning about the place.

The death of that lone cop though isn't as straightforward as it seems, and the more Redpath digs, the more unexplained ... Read Review

Turning Point, Wayne Andrewartha

The opening salvo in a new detective series based around Jake Shaw, TURNING POINT is set in the US, written by a Kiwi author and published by a New Caledonian based company. Which unlikely series of events has come together to create a multi-threaded thriller styled novel with some very topical plot threads.

Starting out with the story of Tommy Sessions, who leaves jail after serving 3 years for his part in an armed robbery, morphing on the way out into William Brass, the leader of an reclusive religious sect who, on the face of it seem peaceful enough, but the ... Read Review

Death of a Diplomat, B.M. Allsopp

The sixth novel now in the Fiji Islands Mystery series, DEATH OF A DIPLOMAT has a lot of twists and turns in the personal sides of the lives of DI Joe Horseman and his team. Because of that you really would be best to dip into the series a tad earlier than this one, just to get a taste for the day to day life of a Fijian Police DI, and the sorts of cases that he and his team have to deal with. To say nothing of an unsupportive, mildly bats boss, and Horseman's beloved Junior Shiners rugby team.

Rugby looms largish in these storylines as Horseman was a very famous Fijian ... Read Review