All the Reviews

All novels by Finn Bell have guaranteed two things. Wonderful sense of place, and morally ambiguous characters. As it is with THE LOST DEAD where we have three Maori boys, wanted criminals, on the run, barely one step ahead of the cops and the gangs they have annoyed along the way. There is also a missing, young woman, somebody one of these young lads is thoroughly infatuated with, and determined to find. Then there's the huge earthquake, that causes massive landslides across the isolated Southern Alps region of New Zealand. Everyone is scrambling around looking for victims trapped by ... Read review

I will admit to having been a bit of a Brexit junkie, addicted to the podcast Brexitcast from the BBC, which meant SHADOW OF DOUBT arrived at a particularly pertinent time, set as it is in the time of Brexit, with a very interesting central premise - would the overwhelming Remain vote in Scotland push people there to an IRA like terror campaign in England.

Starting out in London, against the backdrop of big international banks, trading floors and highly specialised financial departments, there's a real sense of the friendship that close working partnerships build, that ... Read review

In her first full length novel for adults, educational and children's writer Carmel Reilly has delivered a crime fiction book that tackles sibling relationships and family secrets full on.

Set in two main timelines, in 2016 Lori receives a visit from a policeman to tell her that her estranged brother Scott is in hospital, seriously injured in a hit and run accident. Back in 1993 we meet Lori and Scott as teenagers, and discover the secrets that tore the family apart. Is it this that triggered the hit and run, or was it simply an accident?

Given that this is a ... Read review

THE SISTERS' LOVER is an engaging, slightly quirky historical fiction novel set mostly within Australia. Starting out in post war 1950, Flis, Australian by birth, is returning to the family property after many years in Wellington, New Zealand. Flis hasn't been in contact with her younger sister since she left and Gladdie is now missing, presumed dead. Flis and her disabled husband Kip, meet up with a young man on board the ship that bought them to Australia and Roy joins them on this journey.

Combining great characters, and a wonderful sense of place and time, THE SISTERS ... Read review

THE ASH THE WELL AND THE BLUEBELL is one of those novels that's categorised as crime but takes the expectations that come with that and tips them out the nearest window. The blurb describes the scenario well:

Losing her daughter to the Christchurch earthquake sends Lily back to her childhood village in northern England to scatter Charlie's ashes. It's a place of ghosts for Lily after the mysterious drowning of a school friend at the old village well - a tragedy somehow linked to the death of a local woman accused of witchcraft three hundred years earlier.

... Read review

When Pamela, Lady Scawton discovers a stranger dead in the woods near the family home, Ashly House, it triggers a multi-generational, multi-timeline search for the truth. The stranger was carrying an odd stone in his pocket, along with a letter addressed to Pamela's dead husband. Pamela is a good person, generous and very down to earth, unaffected by the title although greatly attached to the estate she has called home for many years. She has, however, endured many years of abuse from her overbearing husband and a selfish, over-entitled brat of a son.

The stone turns out ... Read review

Michael Robotham’s crime novels have always had an easy grace about them, somehow managing to be dense works without appearing to be so.  As with all second novels, the second novel of a new series has much on the line in proving to fickle readers that their leap of faith into new territory was warranted.  We visit again with criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven in When She Was Good.

Evie Cormac, the infamous ‘Angel Face’, is now approaching legal age in which she will soon be processed out of the failing model that is the British foster home system.  Evie is still keeping ... Read review

The third book in the Alex Clayton Art Mystery series sees a shift of setting to the Western District of Victoria and one of those big pastoral leases that were such a part of the landscape down there. The title of the novel "The Shifting Landscape" is quite cleverly pitched referring as it does to the way that farming has changed in recent years, the way that succession creates issues for so many of those generational farming families, and the way that changing perceptions of the landscape are finally starting to come about.

Along with the main thread, that of the ... Read review

An assassin thriller with a twist CUTTING THE CORD features Amira Knox, a member of a secret terrorist group - the Authenticity Movement. Raised in the group, after being adopted by the leader as an infant, Amira and her siblings have been trained as an elite group of assassins, tasked with the elimination of affluent Europeans, identified as enemies of the movement's purpose by her father.

What you end up with in CUTTING THE CORD is a classic thriller styled novel, with an unusual premise in that this assassin is searching for meaning in her own life, increasingly aware ... Read review