All the Reviews

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

Dinner at the Night Library, Hika Harada

Can't remember quite how this novel piqued my interest, but I do love whimsical, gentle Japanese crime fiction and the library had a copy so...

First up, this was a fabulous read, full of whimsy and gentle humour, with a fantabulous setup: a library that only opens after dark, never allows patrons to check books out, and consists entirely of the collections of books that were once owned by now deceased Japanese authors. 

The employees are also an eclectic set of people - former booksellers and librarians who have had rocky past careers, all of whom have come ... Read Review

Ōkiwi Brown, Cristina Sanders

Cristina Sanders is a new to me author who has written a number of books in the past along the same lines of ŌKIWI BROWN - a fictionalised version of historical events that incorporate early tales (tall and true) of Aotearoa. This story is told in a series of anecdotes, incorporating the story of a man, a waler who washed up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson many years ago, in the early days of colonial settlement. He sets himself up with a pub and makes a home with a woman found abandoned on the nearby beach, quickly developing a reputation for evil and nasty going's on.  ... Read Review

No Less the Devil, Stuart MacBride

Fans of Stuart MacBride's novels will be particularly familiar with the way that he likes to keep his police characters, in particular, at the end of their tether, under pressure from all sides, and frequently having a bit of a dummy spit by way of a coping mechanism.

NO LESS THE DEVIL starts out with a couple of very young teenagers killing a homeless man, then switches focus to a current day police team, and the search for a serial killer, dubbed 'The Bloodsmith', with two members of the team looking for him as the main focus. DS Lucy McVeigh and her colleague DC Duncan ... Read Review