How small people are and how “they only mean something in relation to each other” – when they connect like streams of a river it is a glorious flow, when they separate and become more and more isolated from each other, it is tragic, for them and for their environments. The Mires captures this message through the stories of three families. The area they live in, on the Kāpiti Coast, is near a swamp, whose waters once flowed freely through the area, and will do so again: “We are too old and wise and deep to trouble ourselves with the impermanence of your wood and concrete and steel.” The eldest ..read more

David Coventry is from a family of mountain climbers, like Edmund Hillary: “someone whose body seemed permanently full of oxygen.” Coventry used to be fast, “I had speed, just a natural event amongst my genes”- then he was struck with depression, and then Epstein-Barr, and eventually that “cracker of a disease” myalgic encephalomyelitis, ME. To this dismal cocktail add ADD and you get a life that doesn’t cohere, a parallel life to that of the counterfactual Coventry, a doppelganger who remains able: “I can’t imagine illness without my twin. I just can’t do it.” Performance is Coventry’s life ..read more

An utterly compelling read that drags the reader through the dangers of invasive information-gathering, the “erratic, unstable, passion-ruled soul of man”, and the determination of a wronged woman. The ride starts with the beta testing of a state-of-the-art surveillance system, where ten subjects are instructed by Fusion, the agency that will search for them, to ‘go zero’ – to completely disappear for thirty days. The ten participants are a mix of five professionals and “five representatives of ordinary, uninformed credulous America” – at stake is a US$ three million reward. Thus, Going Zero ..read more

Two fifty-something women going on a road trip to engage with their ancestry, their past, home-baked pies – and to visit the “coal face” of today’s biggest existential threat: global warming. Rebecca Preistley is “a writer and academic who writes about climate change”, her life-long friend is Maz (Marianne Rogers) a civil engineer, once a mining engineer. End Times is a work of autofiction, and is sad, funny, scary, and educational. Maz is the extrovert of the pair, and more laid back about the world racing to environmental collapse – or, as they are on the West Coast of the South Island, the ..read more

Mami Suzuki is moonlighting as a private eye in Kobe, Japan. She is doing so unbeknownst to the management of the Orient Hotel where she works – she needs the money to support herself, her mother, and her daughter. Four stories, each linked by the word of mouth of a client, present Mami Suzuki as shrewd, empathetic, and sensible – although possibly with a bit of a drinking problem. Suzuki’s four cases take us to wonderfully described destinations; you can smell hear and taste the locations. One story is set in Kobe, with the president of a major pearl business concerned about theft in the org ..read more

Hana Westerman is back staking out houses, interviewing suspects, filming crimes in progress, and piecing together scraps of information. The only problem is, she’s no longer a detective: “Hana had walked away from the cops because she couldn’t live with the darkness anymore. But the darkness had followed her. And it had followed her family.” Hana has returned to where she grew up; Tātā Beach on the west coast of the North Island. Her rapper daughter Addison and Addison’s best friend PLUS1, are living in Hana’s house in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, about two hours away. Hana is renting just down ..read more

An Aotearoa we are all familiar with – extreme weather events, houses washed away, roads impassable, calls for resilience and re-building. But in Emergency Weather these events have become more extreme: “Glacial slowness had become an oxymoron.” The landscape is scarred: in Wellington there are wind turbines with their blades ripped off, many roofs replaced by plastic sheeting. We trace the stories of three people through what has become a treacherous unpredictable land. Allie is an Otago dairy farmer whose husband has not been able to overcome the despair of endless droughts. Zeke is a teena ..read more

Lou Galloway has given up his Hollywood dream and taken off for Mexico – where he falls into a whirlwind adventure, acting out the role of a lifetime. With a magic realism start, a Narcos middle, and a [no spoilers] ending, El Flamingo is a joyous ride. From a deserted beachside bar in “Playa del something-or-other” to the jungles outside of Cali, Colombia, El Flamingo keeps the reader in what will be, for many, territory familiar from American movies and TV shows. And Lou’s lines in part coming from scripts makes the reader even more at home. “Who would’ve thought acting was a superpower?” T ..read more

Dif is a rough sleeper, for good reasons he is lying low, keeping clear of the law. However, when he witnesses a woman’s body being dumped in a quarry, he knows he must do something to get justice for the victim – but that he also must keep himself safe. He gathers scraps of evidence from the body before the next day’s quarry work obliterates it, and he tries for long-distance communication with his foster sister, NSW Park Ranger Cal Nyx, leaving her clues to follow. Cal is taking a break from her job, trying, but failing, to face the death of her Aunt Zin. Zin took Cal in when she was at sch ..read more

Inspector Maximo Betancourt is back solving crimes in sweaty bustling 1940 Singapore. Like his first outing, Waking the Tiger, Chasing the Dragon is full of colourful characters, lots of action, and an intriguing crime to solve. In Waking the Tiger, Betancourt was struggling to investigate a murder due to the victim being an Asian woman, therefore of little interest to the colonial authorities and businesses. In Chasing the Dragon, his investigation is hampered by the victim being an American man, so of such high interest that many agencies want his demise ruled an unfortunate accident and th ..read more