Karen

When they said write what you know, Trish McCormack got the memo. Growing up at the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, and having worked in various national parks in NZ, her settings are always gloriously depicted. In this case Mt Cook is the central location, with two timelines wind through the story of Kath, her family, and her disappearance.

The two timelines are 1946 - when a volatile Stella is hired as mountain guide, vowing never to return to the more expected domestic life of a woman. She roams the Southern Alps, alongside her mentor Philip and a troubled returned soldier Jim, reveling in the freedom their work life gives them, but a tragedy at that time threatens everything they love.

In 2019 veteran journalist Kath walks away from her life, leaving behind old mountaineering photographs, and not a lot of other clues as to why she has suddenly disappeared. When her daughters, journalist Robin, and alpine guide Helen, discover a deathbed confession, they then have to work out how that connects to Kath's own disappearance. Which needless to say weaves its way back in time to the story of Stella, Philip and Jim.

I say needless to say, because it's obvious that there must be some connection, otherwise why the two timelines, but what and how or even why is not clear at all. What is clear is the way that the two timelines are executed really well, never confusing or bamboozling the reader, always moving the story forward, despite the necessary backward steps.

The author has blended historical and crime fiction here, with what almost reads like a travel guide to a wonderful location, which frankly is almost as big a character as the people in this story. Never detracting from the story of these multiple generations though, it's quite evocative to think of something dreadful happening in such a peaceful, welcoming place though.

Notable as well that despite the presence of Philip and Jim, this is a story of the women - their capacity and competency, and their connections.

A debut novel with a very evocative title, LIE DOWN WITH DOGS, is centred around a burnt out, damaged Detective, Kyle Williams. After being shot and losing the love of his life in a disastrous undercover investigation, he's strangely best placed to take on the cold-case murder of two young lovers. There's something a bit personal about his determination to solve this, although the link he discovers between the undercover operation that went badly wrong, and this murder is almost enough to derail him completely. But as you'd expect, when it comes to corrupt cops, wealthy drug dealers, and a chance for revenge, there's no taking a backward step.

Williams is definitely one of those broken, morose, hell-bent on revenge style of detectives, that stick with an investigation, no matter the damage it inflicts on them. After all, there's nothing more healing than throwing the damage back in a few faces sometimes, and this crowd is very much the wrong sort, who need taking down a peg or two. The action is delivered in a fast-paced manner, and Williams is an odd combination of profoundly sympathetic and deeply annoying character that just works. It's a vivid, violent read, mired in the worst of Christchurch - a location normally prized for it's beauty and gentility. No surprise that this author is known for his cinematography - he's got an eye for location which shines through.

A worthy finalist in the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Awards, Best First Novel category.

(You might be wondering why suddenly reviews of books read last year have begun to show up - I found all my notes from the time - too many backup drives / not enough indexing!)

A stand-alone novel from Australian author, Sandi Wallace, WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW is set on a secluded island where Tess works at home, writing children's mystery books, and her travelling husband returns to on weekends from the job he loves, to a wife that he adores. It seems, to all the world, like the perfect life, enough neighbours to create a sense of community, enough distance to create a buffer, a sense of sanctuary, even a goofy chocolate labrador dog. A feeling shattered by sightings of a prowler, triggering unresolved trauma for Tess - her best friend's death was never explained, and suddenly Tess is doing all sorts of odd things she can't explain, and Joe seems to be hiding something. Then a young local woman is abducted and what seemed idyllic suddenly starts to look very shakey indeed.

The use of secrets and past events to set up a present day threat isn't new territory in crime fiction, but WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW uses them, and the isolated, almost locked room setting, to good effect. The inclusion of electronic stalking and hijacked communication is also a very current day and real threat, which creates a sense of immediacy and overall / overwhelming threat here that invokes such confusion in Tess, and therefore becomes increasingly unsettling - the idea of who you can trust when everything suddenly gets very odd is palpable here.

The setting is well invoked as well - small community / small island and the immediacy of the weather and the remoteness is cleverly done, as is the author's own knowledge of the solitary life of an author, made even more stark by Joe's long absences from home. His reasons for being away - a salesman on the road selling environmentally-friendly insulation is plausible, but on the home front there's a neighbour who has suddenly started behaving oddly, and some weird in house things - passages of text appearing in her work in progress, things moving / going missing / adding to the presence of that stalker, meaning a constant ramping up of the pressure, tension and fear. And, in something that is again all too believable, a lurking property developer, pushy and unpleasant.

Meanwhile there's Kathy, held captive for nearly forty years, keeping her feelings on scraps of paper, determined to never let her much older captor break her spirit.

So a lot going on, much of which has Tess as the obvious connection, which will leave the reader really wondering about her sanity, whilst also open to questioning Joe's commitment to his wife, or maybe there's something dodgy about the neighbours and the island in general, whilst always there's the thought of who on earth Kathy is in the background.

Whilst it could all sound very busy, the pace is high, and events, and introductions to a lot of people and situations roll out quickly, with the reader never struggling to keep track of who or what although why doesn't become clear (as you'd expect) until you get to the ending of what was a very believable, tension packed ride of a novel.

Well this is surprising, and a testament to the power of a bit of a tidy up sometimes, because in the process of doing so I discovered I'd not published these notes ... a long time ago. Apologies to the author - this is a series of four books set in Iceland, from Kiwi Author Grant Nicol. The main character is Grímur Karlsson and it's well worth reading.

A dour, somewhat put upon character Karlsson is one of those dogged, downtrodden sorts of detectives that seems to specialise in falling into major cases, literally sometimes. The author has a particularly inventive touch here in the way he sets Karlsson up against the treacherous geography of Iceland, and the equally treacherous aspects of human nature - the greed, selfishness and addiction of too many people part of the reason for Karlsson's constant darkness.

The story revolves around Karlsson's search for a young girl who has run in to a cold dark night, whilst a cryptic message left beside a charred corpse in the centre of Reykjavik seems to be hinting at a possible gang war. The connections between these two occurrences eventually reveal themselves, leaving Karlsson with a trail that leads from junkies on the streets to the very top of Icelandic society.

This is the third novel in this series, which I've really enjoyed, and finding these notes reminds me that I've still got the fourth book here - bumped up the queues immediately now.

One of those book series in audio format I've been borrowing from the library on and off now, A LESSON IN DYING is the first in the Inspector Simon Ramsay series, which is one of those quintessentially British, small town mystery, where the murders often have that slightly dotty sense about them (in this one a particularly nasty headmaster is hanged in the playground on the night of the school Hallowe'en party). Because it's been a while since I listened to this - think of this more as a note to self than a full review, but I really like this series. Ramsay is a great character, as you'd expect from a writer like this, the mysteries are twisty, but followable in audio, and the resolutions are never quite as obvious as they seem. In this outing, the caretaker of the school, and a governor is the one that really sets out to prove that the headmaster's wife (the obvious suspect) didn't do it, ably and enthusiastically assisted by his daughter. As is often the way with these small English village mysteries, there are a lot of people hiding a lot of dark secrets.

A good audio version that is easily followed whilst doing other things - which is always useful for the weekend task runs about the farm.

Alexis Turner walks into a police station to report her assault by a psychologist - the same man that DS Judith Lee has taken a report about in the past. By the end of that same day Turner appears to have vanished, and Lee is dealing with the guilt that she feels over the poor advice she gave the first accuser 10 years ago. It's a job a bit outside Lee's normal remit, but nothing in Lee's life is exactly normal right now. She's also dealing with the fallout of her arrest of a fellow police officer, a nepo baby of the worst kind, a corrupt thug and a bully protected by his higher up father. Lee has some support in the service, albeit a lot of which stays very low under the radar, meanwhile her motorbike is vandalised in police parking and it seems that her career could very well be in jeopardy.

Soon after Turner vanished into thin air, beautifully wrapped packages, containing cryptic notes start showing up. At the psychologist's home, a socialite's mansion, and the run down apartment where a single father, Jack, lives with his young son after the suicide of his partner many years before, a complicated relationship, leaving him doing the very best he can to raise his son, without realising the full extent of her experience.

Until the psychologist is shot dead, the socialite and her young daughter die from poisoning and the young father is framed for their murders. It's an elaborate, and dangerous plot that's being executed by somebody who seems to be in the know, very well prepared and resourceful, especially as it looks like Lee is the only person who starts to see some connections, which have to be painstakingly pieced together by trawling backwards through old records, to find the source of the gun, and then a hint of a possible explanation or connection. Meanwhile the threat becomes very personal as Lee's past actions are pulled into what's a complicated and very chilling story.

Styled as a thriller, this is also a story of childhood trauma, and the way that society struggles to find a way to help those that have been severely damaged by the actions of others. It pulls Lee into that scenario whilst also revealing her own family backstory and a violent event in the past, that could very well be used against her by this determined and ruthless perpetrator. Each of the victims seems to have been punished, sexual misbehaviour revealed, betrayal uncovered, and ultimately, a young father manipulated into appearing for all the world to be the guilty party.

There is a lot going on in THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE, and looking at it objectively, you'd think that it might be just a bit overwhelming, but the multiple stories are rolled out carefully, with the reader able to follow a complicated series of backgrounds, and the revelations without any heavy lifting on their part. Unlike the characters here, many of whom, not least Lee herself, are doing some very heavy lifting of their own, as the novel explores the way that childhood trauma informs current day actions - both positively and negatively - forming personality types that can go either way. The strength of this novel is not so much in the investigation, which is excellently portrayed, fast paced and cleverly constructed, but rather in the exploration of trauma and the reactions. Particularly the way that Judith and her, frankly unhinged mother, remember and react to the past that involved them both, reflected in the way that two sisters were affected by the actions of a violent, awful father, and the realisation of those outcomes on the people around them.

THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE is confronting reading, intense and powerful, it's a highly recommended revenge story that has some very battered edges to it.

Second in the McGarry Stateside series which is a spinoff from the Dublin Trilogy series (which isn't a trilogy), and a side road from the MCM Investigations series and, well for those that have read Caimh McDonnell's books already you'll get the "chaos" and if you're new to the whole thing - welcome to the best little madhouse in Ireland. Or the US in this case. And, of course, I'm behind with this review - maybe the chaos is contagious. Maybe I'll go with that as an excuse from here on in.

Anyway - Bunny McGarry (you really really REALLY have to read at least the first few Dublin Trilogy books and then the first in the McGarry Stateside series to have an ice-creams chance in a hellscape of figuring out what the actual .... is going on here - but trust me, that's no trial. In fact you may find yourself, like I am now, vaguely obsessed waiting for the next book to arrive - preferably in audio format because Morgan C. Jones is just the best narrator there is (although hasn't the voice of Smithy switched a bit in recent outings), and what's with the Sisters of the Saint and why is Bunny in America searching for Simone, which always seems to end up as the furthest thing from his ticked off list when all hell breaks loose.

Read the blurbs on these books and you'll get a slight hint of the styling, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the utterly absorbing chaos field that you step into once you start reading (listening in my case) to these series.

Anyway - long story short, Bunny's a man on a mission to find the woman he loves. As are a lot of dangerous people. The only ones who know where she is are members of a rogue order of very unusual nuns (The Sisters of the Saint) who have, in the words of the blurb "raised not being found to the level of art form". They've also had a good kick at being the most unexpected types of nuns you're ever likely to come across. In the meantime, Bunny's drawn around him a very unlikely band of brothers - most of whom appear to be something straight out of "unexpected superhero casting 101".

In this outing it turns out that the required nuns have been kidnapped, and we're sort of in a Labours of Hercules type scenario where every step forward is a step to the left. The labours are being dictated by the kidnappers in a round about sort of way, but the Sisters are determined to get their fellow nuns back, and they are not above using McGarry as a human battering ram in the process. So when McGarry discovers that the one man that might have the clue to the next Labour is a priest whose life work is keeping kids out of gangs, although why such a man would have an assassin on his tail is just one of the mysterious questions that McGarry had better get an answer to in a hell of a hurry. Even if that does mean going undercover in the church, although the no swearing, no drinking and no violence rules might be the thing that finally breaks the camels back.

The whole thing is manic good fun, with daring doings, fabulous twists and turns, and some extensive and hilarious dialogue, misunderstandings and mayhem. And really if this review has confused you, dear reader, then welcome to the Bunny McGarry / States/ MCM Investigations / Dublin (not a) Trilogy and a whole world of highly addictive crazy good fun.