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Chrissie has got everything: a devoted husband, three lovely children, her health and a self-owned business.  She coaches her daughter’s netball team, is a martial arts practitioner, and has lots of friends.  Hardly the person you would pick as a meth addict, but a moment of insecurity and weakness leads to a downward spiral that ends up ruining her life and the lives of all those around her.

Chrissie and Dave met in the Navy, and they live in Auckland, where Dave works for another ex-Navy mate, Marty, in his construction business.  Dave is also a martial arts expert and teacher, and he coaches his son’s soccer team.  They are at a party when Chrissie takes the fatal first step towards addiction, and Crystal Reign documents the horror of methamphetamine addiction with no pulled punches.

Chrissie’s deterioration is gradual at first, with her assuring Dave she is in control and her use will stop.  But then she is more the drug than she is herself and her behaviour traumatises the children and makes Dave feel helpless for the first time in his life – well the first time since suffering from his father’s alcoholism when he was a child.  Dave had vowed he would never put his own children through that, but his first reaction to Chrissie’s behaviour it to turn to his father’s best friend, Jack … Daniels.

The opening of Crystal Reign is so horrific that it is possible non-New Zealanders will see it as over the top – but New Zealanders will recognise it as a version of true events.  The story is told backwards and forwards in time (chronology markers provided by key sporting events and classic rock concerts), the point of view does get a bit wandering in parts, but the plotting it solid and you really are in suspense as to what is going to happen to the central family that is losing everything.  They have few friends who stay loyal to them, but those that do are remarkable.

Dave and his eldest daughter Megan are great characters, and through the events they end up supporting each other and the two younger children as mates rather than as father and daughter.  Dave is flawed – his ‘locker room’ banter with Marty quite awful – and there is always the worry of how he will use his lethal martial arts skills in dealing with some of the ghastly people that Chrissie has become entwined with.  We lose track of Chrissie for large parts of the novel, and the story is focussed on the devastating effects her addiction has on her family, friends and work-mates.  The effects on the two younger children are particularly chilling.

There is lots of information about meth addiction in the book, and you find out about the legal processes, the rehabilitation options, and community support groups.  But none of this is dry or cumbersome, there is a bit of clunky early history added near the beginning, but that is helpful in filling out Dave’s character.  Oddly enough there are some funny bits as well!   Crystal Reign is not a pleasant read, but it is a compelling one and one that gets beyond the stereotypes of meth addiction in New Zealand, highlighting the frightening scope of the problem.

What a great genre mix-up: police procedural, horror, urban fantasy and cli fi all bundled together with a bit of romance thrown in!

Teeth of the wolf is set in a not too distant future, in an Auckland that is broiling hot and algal bloom stinky, where petrol use, and therefore driving, is severely restricted, where coffee is grown “down in the Rimutakas and the Kaimai Ranges”, where there are “… a million tiny struggles to survive in a city slipping into the sea”, and where the explosive atmosphere is pushing the violent crime rate through the cloud-roiling  sky.

Penny Yee is a scientifically minded young woman who runs her own forensic science business, Matiu is her haunted brother, not long out of jail, not yet totally extricated from his bad-guy cronies, still haunted by possibly really real demons, and Penny’s driver.  As the body count rises, it is obvious something seriously wrong is going on – something to do with missing pregnant women, micro-greens, and demons who have possibly “slipped sideways through a portal to some other dimension …”

As things get creepier for Matiu, Penny is determined to explain all the odd happenings away in a neat scientific manner – even when her DNA machine explodes, spitting out un-human results; even when she starts seeing glimpses of Makere, the demon with an uncanny resemblance to Matiu.  If things aren’t hectic enough, Penny’s lab technician seems to like her, and her parents have a suitor lined up for her, and Matiu seems to be getting odd vibes from his parole officer.

Matiu’s troubled biological mother, Penny’s Aunt Marama, is also swept along in the conspiracy, but is she central to the plot, or just a diversion?  And there is Penny’s dog, reacting off the scale every time he catches sight of Matiu’s old crime buddy, Simon Kingi.  But then Penny did call her dog Cerberus – and Penny is short for Pandora … and in Pandora fashion we end up with mysteries on multiple fronts, all of which get resolved in the end, in both a scientific and a far from scientific way – oh, did I mention the bog body?

Teeth of the Wolf is the second in The path of Ra series but can be read as a stand-alone.  It is a wild ride of a novel, and there just must be more to come!

Hand sanitizer anyone?  You will want some after reading the latest in Cat Connor’s Byte series, QuByte, which deals with biological terror threats.

Special Agent Ellie Iverson (nee Conway) from Delta A, an elite force within the FBI, gets involved in disparate cases – the links between which are a bit of a puzzle: Her FBI Director Cait O’Hare has been killed, as have heads of various intelligence agencies, and the Trump administration’s isolationism makes working with overseas colleagues a bit tricky.  And then there’s the kidnapped monkey, and the hit and run of the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who had managed to sneak out a file hidden in a song that talked about the theft of a mysterious infectious agent, and the proof is in the contaminated bottled water that has been distributed to high-end hotels.

Delta A is a close-knit team, extremely professional, prone to cutesy nicknames, and with an ESP link that could be the result of long-term familiarity, or not … Ellie has a form of lexical synaesthesia, where she doesn’t taste words but sees them floating, crawling, slinking … and she is also in the habit of seeing yellow fluffy ducks and visualising metaphors.  Oh, and her most useful brain-storming partner is an imaginary friend.  We see the world through her brain.

The plot is driven, and all the Delta A team, including Argo the trauma dog, end up at O’Hare’s ranch house, surrounded by an armed biker gang, which is just par for the course for Ellie, except this time her husband and infant twin daughters are there.  QuByte is about a big conspiracy and the dangers of “… the ‘alternative facts’ brigade’s propaganda machine”, and there is a more personal kind of dread: “How well do we ever know someone?”, and the toll of ongoing harassment “… living with constant harassment isn’t one thing.  It’s bullying. It’s undermining. It is disbelief wrapped in pain.”

Connor quite optimistically misses New Zealand off the list of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance countries that are in line for the planned biological attacks, as it’s “not a strategic country for terrorists” due to its “isolation and small population”.  And there is an idealistic plea for people to: “Not just listen but hear what’s said.  And then act on the knowledge instead of pretending it’s not our problem as humans inhabiting the earth with other humans.”

Ellie has a knack (with some spooky help) of solving riddles and codes, the biggest riddle is whether the death of her friend and boss, Cait, is connected to the other killings, and whether all of the killings are connected to the clear and present danger of the biological threat.  And QuByte has a curious ending, where at least one mystery is solved with a very mundane solution but the others? … “Pollyanna has left the building” and we might need to wait for the next Byte to fully understand the mystery.  An exciting and intriguing read.

Stall turns is the third in the Claire Hardcastle mystery series and starts with Claire and her detective boyfriend Jack Body having a well-earned break.  They are on their way to help with the Labour Day Weekend sheep muster on Jack’s uncle’s remote sheep station in the King Country.  Sounds fun, but what Claire hadn’t envisaged was the dead bodies, the earthquake, the flood, being buried alive, being drugged and left out in the bush to freeze to death or having to pilot a sabotaged plane!

Claire and Jack get a bit lost on the way to Uncle Pat’s and when Jack is trying to find someone for directions, Claire stumbles (literally) on human remains.  They are happy to leave the unfortunate find to the local Police and carry on to the sheep station.  Once there, Pat and his wife Joanne tell them the property they found the body on is a luxury lodge, often a discreet getaway for the rich and famous.  And that some of the staff and guests will be joining them on the muster.

Retakure Lodge is run by a Chinese outfit that caters for Chinese business people as well as international celebrities.  Some of their guests had joined the muster the previous year as well, and that they been “a feisty lot”, arguing all the time.  The novel starts stacking up like an Agatha Christie murder in a stately home, as characters and clues are introduced.  We meet a pair of Chinese brothers, “I wasn’t sure their values aligned with mine” muses Claire.  A Chinese Lodge employee Wu, who appears not to speak English and Phil the Lodge’s farm manager.

The muster is going well until nature intervenes and an earthquake sees Claire save a man’s life and then end up at the Lodge where more characters and interesting photos and bits of information are added.  Over the next days we get more natural disasters, more bodies, more being stranded and more clues as to what crimes may have been committed, and their possible motives.

I really enjoyed the clues and mystery solving of Stall turns, I had enjoyed Claire’s previous outing, Straight and level, however in that novel it is obvious what is going on, there’s no real mystery solving.  But in Straight and level Claire’s character is great, young, capable and confident; in Stall turns we get mystery, but we also get a mixed Claire, a times one with a whiff of Danielle Steel about her, knowing when “There are times it pays to be a girl”, politely putting up with endlessly being called “girlie”, and responsibly handing an olive branch to Jack after an unconscionable rant at her for going for a walk alone, and her later feeling guilty because she had disobeyed him.

We do get to see the ‘real Claire’ in Stall turns, saving lives, being bold, chatting “the magical world of aviation” with Brett the Lodge’s pilot.  And it could have been the stress and alcohol that led to her and Joanne having a giggling fit over the fantasy of George Clooney arriving on the scene!  And when (possibly for plot reasons) she and Joanne are left alone at the Lodge because Pat declares it would be “much better if I don’t have to worry about you two”, it is not surprising that marathon running and high country sheep station living Joanne and inventive and technically savvy (“Aviate, Navigate and Communicate “) Claire make a great thriller section of the novel.

We don’t really get to know the full story behind the murder mystery, or indeed what the final body count was; it wasn’t Jack’s case, and he and Claire just want to get out of there.  But we do find out enough to be satisfied.  And hopefully Claire will have got over her ‘lesser half’ stage by the time the next Claire Hardcastle mystery rolls around.