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

Take two is a random collection of incidents from the U.K. childhoods of two sisters, Caroline and Vivian Thonger. Vivian now lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Take two is like a catalogue of memories, complete with illustrations of remembered artefacts. The reader pieces together the sisters’ histories, their fears, their celebrations, their horrors, and the intergenerational effects of wartime trauma. Take Two reminded me of Frankie McMillan’s My mother and the Hungarians, a collection of short, short stories about the Hungarian refugee experience in New Zealand in the 1950s – each story ..read more

“Britain needs someone to believe in right now” – its citizens still reeling from the aftermath of Brexit and the badly managed Covid-19 pandemic. Ace Penhalagon, who has risen to Wimbledon and Olympic glory, appears to be their knight in shining armour – “But yet again, time and fate were playing their twisted games.” Queen, King, Ace is another wonderful mash-up of romance, history, social commentary and #YeahNoir, following on from Wife after Wife (Henry VIII), Sister to Sister (Elizabeth I) and Notorious (Richard III). Ace Penhalagon is “a little Cornish boy who knew nothing of his roots ..read more

Gunflower is a collection of stories written by Laura Jean McKay. The collection includes stories written over two decades, there are short stories, short short stories, and flash-fiction-length stories. They are grouped into three sections: Birth, Life, Death, and they range from laugh-out-loud funny to truly devastating. They deal with the arbitrary relationships between humans and non-human animals, between humans and humans, and between humans and nature. Birth. Why do we buy houses and coats for some non-human animals, and eat others? – “By the time Jeffries leaves it’s almost nine. Ed h ..read more

Dinah Glover has fled to Tokyo from Oamaru, Aotearoa. She is living in prime real estate Itabashi, yet her apartment building and surroundings are weirdly deserted. Yasuko Kinoshita fled to Tokyo from Sapporo years ago, she is beautiful, immaculate, and stylish, yet also rude and coarse. We first glimpse the two women in an extraordinary prologue describing various people in Ueno Park. We see the two women, both in distress, yet somehow privately coping. We know they will meet; we know they are separate, yet they will be drawn to each other. “How terrible it is, suddenly, to exist in a story ..read more

Sheriff James Cohen is struggling with an aged and impaired father, a recalcitrant teenaged son, a wife who loves him but who has left him, and growing legal and financial woes. Then local crime-writer/heavy-drinker Peter Conner calls in to say his son, Lucas, is missing, and Cohen’s life starts tipping into a black hole. In His Favourite Graves, Cleave takes us back to Acacia Pines, U.S.A., the setting for his Whatever it Takes. Acacia Pines rivals the number of murderers in Midsummer with the number of its psychopaths. And the plotting of Cleave’s latest offering is, as always, complex and ..read more

“I tried to sigh,” Alba says. “But that banged my head into the roof.” Alba is not in a good way – she is squashed into a small space getting increasingly smaller. She is with Stanley and Drew, who are each in different cramped spaces – the three can only communicate through walls and vents. They are not sure if they are alone in their plight – they do know they are on a spaceship called Audition, and that: “This is a beautiful ship”. The ship is propelled by amplified sound, “It had only been used as torture before but it worked for travel as well.” They decided to rebel, to stop making nois ..read more

Is the narrator imprisoned? Infirm or otherwise incapacitated? Is he mentally compromised? Is he a detained dissident, a barefooted tramp, or has he been imprisoned for fratricide? He seems aged and frail, we know he absconds at one point, towards the coast: “Any road’s a way out with a bit of persistence.” Or maybe we are reading his imaginings as he lies dying, or recently dead? Maybe the main narrator in Some Things Wrong stands in for any one of us, stumbling through life without the confidence of commitment: “Shambling on out of little more than habit. Or lack of imagination”? The charac ..read more