Category Archives: #yeahnoir

Novels can get your adrenaline pumping, engage your head or your heart, or take you to other worlds.  Dead Lemons to a degree does all four of these.  The narrator is a paraplegic and we first meet him hanging upside … Continue reading →

Martyn Percival is on a belated OE – in his early fifties he has successfully salvaged a career post redundancy, but wasn’t able to salvage his marriage once his wife of over thirty years was determined to leave.  He was … Continue reading →

The title of this novel refers to a true incident in 1981 when one of our top SIS spooks lost his briefcase; when it was discovered by a journalist it had been left in the Aro Valley and found to … Continue reading →

What a great book!  The direction of our fear looks at the many many small decisions we make every day that result in benefit or harm, to ourselves or to others.  Sometimes small harms and slights sometimes catastrophic.  It deals … Continue reading →

Natasha Johnson, a 15-year-old schoolgirl – seemingly a paragon to her peers and elders – is found murdered at her school camp at Piha Beach.  Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Nick Knight lands the job of managing the suspects side of … Continue reading →

Marshall Grade has been laying low in witness protection after quite spectacularly not doing so in American Blood, the previous novel in the Marshall Grade series. But when he finds out U.S. Marshal Lucas Cohen, his witness protection contact, was kidnapped … Continue reading →

CJ Carver describes herself as “half-English, half-Kiwi” and Spare me the truth is the first of her novels I have read, despite it being the eighth she has written.  And I will be reading more!  Spare me the truth is … Continue reading →

In my last review of a Grant Nicol book – The mistake, also set in Iceland – I suggested a longer novel might allow us more time to get to know his characters, saving them from the “all women are … Continue reading →

The second in Hayton’s Ngaire Blakes series and another great read!  Ngaire is still coming to terms with traumas suffered prior to and during the first installment (The three deaths of Magdalene Lynton) and is working temporarily in a law … Continue reading →

This is cold case mystery story telling at its best – in fact the case was determined not to be a case at all forty years ago when a determination of accidental drowning was made – but now there is … Continue reading →