All the Reviews

The author is well known in his native Iceland for translations, books for children, and as a publisher, but ONE TRUE WORD is his first thriller, and it's guaranteed to divide readers.

The premise is, on the one hand, straight forward, in that after an increasing period of snarking at each other, Júlía and her husband Gíó head off on a small boat to an uninhabited, small island in the middle of a freezing fjord as part of a research trip that Júlía claims is absolutely vital for her current work assignment. She then abandons him there in the depths of the Icelandic winter ... Read review

A serial killer is stalking the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia, targeting young girls and women, swimmers whose bodies are later found on the shoreline. Their deaths are gruesome, the police slow to react, leaving two young women - Raych and Carmen - with feelings of disempowerment, anger and vengeance, who find themselves in the position of taking matters into their own hands. It's important to note that this is not yet another serial killer novel - it's a story of two young women who have had enough.

THE SHARK is a novel built on fury. The anger of young women ... Read review

Following up very closely behind Milligan's debut novel PHEASANT'S NEST, SHELLYBANKS features the same main character, journalist Kate Delaney, and many of the same themes - violence and abuse of women, the PTSD and long-term affects of that on victims, and those that love them.

Whilst it's absolutely not necessary to have read the first book in the series, as there are plenty of throwbacks to the shocking and traumatising events in Delaney's life, it would also help to understand the depths of the PTSD and trauma she, and her much loved ... Read review

Twenty years have passed since the brutal death of James Brandt’s beloved cousin. Will an inquiry into gay hate-crimes offer any resolution?

In 2021 journalist Michael Burge released his first novel Tank Water, a coming-of-age thriller that tackled the issue of homophobic violence, particularly from the late 1980s through to the 1990s. Protagonist James Brandt had left his hometown of Kippen in rural New South Wales as a very young man, only returning after years away when his cousin Tony was found dead under the local ... Read review

Author Natalie Barelli's website has a tagline on it that says 'Psychological Thriller Author' and it lists 10 books written by her (another due out in 2026), although FINDERS KEEPERS is the first I've read.

You can definitely see where the psychology comes into this as she's created a couple of main characters that seem to be in desperate need of psychological counselling at the very least. Rose (aka Iris) is a woman with so much baggage she's going to need a large trolley to keep it moving, and Emily is an author who is, it turns out, a disaster to be around.  ... Read review

‘No one will invest in a business focussed on family violence – it’s the opposite of sexy.’

Lauren Brown, owner of Weeping Angels, smiled. ‘Maybe to men.’

Lauren Brown has a booming business on her hands - an agency that helps victims of family violence obtain protection orders - something notoriously difficult in a world that seems more comfortable in forcing women to prove guilt, then men to prove innocence, but Lauren's also no amateur. She obsessively guards her privacy, and her past, preferring her personal life ... Read review

The last thing this series needs is another review, and besides I've left this way too long and I'm relying on the notes I made at the time of reading. Well I say reading, but I listen to this series via audio books mostly because as much as I loved Leslie Manville's narration, I've come to really enjoy Fiona Shaw's work as well. THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTUNE is the fifth book in the series now, and unless you've been in a coma or doing some determined avoidance, most readers of crime fiction these days will have heard of Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim. 

Whilst there is a ... Read review

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

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