New Releases
The Call
After surviving a brutal attack, Auckland cop DS Honey Chalmers has returned to her hometown to care for her mother. The remote coastal settlement of Waitut? holds complicated memories for Honey, not least the tragic suicide of her younger sister, Scarlett.
Honey is hardest on herself. She let herself get too close to a gang informant. She got sloppy. The Reapers are a 501 gang of Aussie imports, ruthless and organised, and she's pretty sure the informant, mother-of-three Kloe Kovich, paid the price. But when a couple of gang enforcers turn up in Waitut?, Honey realises they are hoping she will lead them to Kloe. But if Kloe is still alive, can Honey save her this time around?
When Honey catches up with her oldest friend, Marshall, her feelings are complicated. As teenagers they were inseparable, but Marshall was the last person to see Scarlett alive, and there are rumours they were sleeping together, that he broke her heart. Honey fears Marshall is not who she wants him to be. Eventually she learns the awful truth about the events that led her sister to take her own life.
When Kloe arrives in town, Honey and Marshall must work together to try and keep the hapless Kloe out of the hands of those who want her - and Honey - silenced.
The Phoenix Crown
San Francisco, 1906. In a city bustling with newly minted millionaires and scheming upstarts, two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano whose career desperately needs rekindling, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress who is determined to escape an arranged marriage.
Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace.
His patronage offers Gemma and Suling the chance of a lifetime, but their lives are thrown into turmoil when a devastating earthquake rips San Francisco apart and Thornton disappears, leaving behind a mystery reaching further than anyone could have imagined . . .
Until the Phoenix Crown reappears five years later at a sumptuous Paris costume ball, drawing Gemma and Suling together in one last desperate quest for justice . . .
The 24th Hour
The Women's Murder Club is out celebrating an engagement at San Francisco's finest restaurant when a blood-curdling scream interrupts the festivities.
They soon discover a young woman who has been the victim of a violent assault. Sergeant Lindsay Boxer makes an arrest. Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano takes the case.
But assigning blame is made impossible due to the victim's chaotic version of events - and the shocking reason behind her ever-changing memory.
As Yuki argues the toughest case of her career, Lindsay must chase down a high-society killer whose target practice may leave the Women's Murder Club short a bridesmaid . . . or two.
Small Hours
If you stood before sunrise in this wild old place, looking through the trees into the garden, here's what you'd see:
A father and son, a fox standing between them.
Jack, home for the first time in years, still determined to be the opposite of his father.
Gerry, who would rather talk to animals than the angry man back under his roof.
Everything that follows is because of the fox, and because Jack's mother is missing. It spans generations of big dreams and lost time, unexpected connections and things falling apart, great wide worlds and the moments that define us.
If you met them in the small hours, you'd begin to piece together their story.
The Rumor Game
A determined reporter and a reluctant FBI agent face off against fascist elements in this gripping historical thriller set in World War II-era Boston from the multi-award-nominated author.
Reporter Anne Lemire writes the Rumor Clinic, a newspaper column that disproves the many harmful rumors floating around town, some of them spread by Axis spies and others just gossip mixed with fear and ignorance. Tired of chasing silly rumors, she wants to write about something bigger.
Special Agent Devon Mulvey, one of the few Catholics at the FBI, spends his weekdays preventing industrial sabotage and his Sundays spying on clerics with suspect loyalties - and he spends his evenings wooing the many lonely women whose husbands are off at war.
When Anne's story about Nazi propaganda intersects with Devon's investigation into the death of a factory worker, the two are led down a dangerous trail of espionage, organized crime, and domestic fascism - one that implicates their own tangled pasts and threatens to engulf the city in violence.
Burma Sahib
Eric Blair stood out amongst his fellow police trainees in 1920s Burma. Nineteen years old, unusually tall, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, after five years spent in the narrow colonial world of the Raj - a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class-conflict - he would emerge as the George Orwell we know.
Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Paul Theroux brings Orwell's Burma years to radiant life, tracing the development of the young man's consciousness as he confronts the social, racial and class politics and the reality of Burma beyond. Through one writer, we come to understand another - and see how what Orwell called 'five boring years within the sound of bugles' were in fact the years that made him.
The Night She Fell
A beautiful young law student dies on the concrete below her third-storey window in chilly Dunedin.
It's clear enough how she died. What isn't is why - or who's involved.
Plenty of people had a reason to hate Ashleigh, with her straight As and perfect looks. She's fallen out with her flatmates, and her boyfriend Xander is having second thoughts about their future together. And then there are the weird messages.
Would You Ask My Husband That?
She's wearing the pants in this family. And washing everyone else's too...
When Sarah's husband, Will, is unexpectedly fired, her first reaction is shock. Then she gets a call offering her his old job.
On principle, she should turn it down. But their young family needs the money and Sarah can't help feeling like her career has taken a backseat all these years. Now it is her turn to shine.
Overnight, Sarah and Will trade places.
She's now the departmental director commuting into the city five days a week and answering client calls on the weekend. He's doing the school run and the laundry. Or at least trying to.
They've always said they are equal partners, so this should be simple, right?
Wrong.
This change was supposed to be the making of them as a family, but as Sarah fights for her chance to have it all, she might end up losing everything...
Joy Moody is Out of Time
On her twin daughters' twenty-first birthday, Joy Moody - proprietor of Bonbeach's premier laundromat - is found dead. Yet that is not the strangest thing happening behind the bright pink facade of Joyful Suds.
For much of their lives, Joy has been telling Cassie and Andie one big, fat lie- that they are from the future, and that when they turn twenty-one they will travel back to the year 2050.
What started as a colourful tale to explain how the girls came to live with her has now become a decade-long deception. Worse still, Joy has started to believe it herself.
The lie is certainly preferable to the truth she can't face - about what happened to the girls' real mother, and how far Joy's gone to keep them 'safe' . . .
With the twins' twenty-first birthday fast approaching, and with Andie starting to have doubts, time is fast running out for Joy Moody. In more ways than one.
The House of Broken Bricks
As Tess traces the sunrise over the floodplains, light that paints the house a startling crimson, she yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was. Instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen - Tess and Richard's 'rainbow twins' - Tess absorbs the quiet. The nights draw in, the soil cools and Richard fights to get his winter crops planted rather than deal with the discussion he cannot bear to have.
Secrets and vines clamber over the broken red bricks and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, in the damp, crumbling soil Sonny knows that something is stirring . . . As the seasons change, and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal.
