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Woohoo this is great: Interesting characters, complex plotting, multiple storylines – and hints at future volumes!  Frida Delaney has come home to her family’s small Kawa Bay home for her mother’s funeral.  She is haunted by a traumatic past and has an uneasy relationship with her ex-cop father.  Also new to the Hawke’s Bay region is Detective Sergeant Kelso Chang, an ex-Wellington cop.  Frida and Chang’s paths cross when Frida discovers the man in the neighbouring beach house has been brutally murdered.  The search to discover the murderer, and Frida’s efforts to clear a woman who is suspected, provide the thread through the story.  Left and right politics, institutional corruption, the fine line between eccentricity and madness, between ambition and greed, and the secrets held within families and organisations – it is a long and involved tale but keeps you guessing and intrigued throughout, and you keep changing your mind about characters the more you learn about them.  There is a theme of division: a group of key characters first got together during that watershed of national division: the 1981 Springbok Tour; there is division between and within the political spectrum (the son in law of the murder victim is putting himself up as a contender for the Wellington Central National Party seat; the victim worked for the National Union of Teachers – and they are a preparing for a strike due to the failure of pay negotiations with a Labour Government); there is division within families too, dysfunctionality common; and both Frida and Kel Chang are working out who they will align with in their new environments.  I don’t want to give any of the plot away as there are secrets to uncover and be shocked by – and cover-ups to be appalled by.  All I can say is read it, and like me you will want to read more about Frida Delaney and DS Kel Chang!

Readers of mysteries, thrillers, chick lit, paranormal fiction, police procedurals and the macabre will all find something to like about Psychobyte! It is the eighth in the …byte series, featuring FBI Agent Ellie Conway.  I found much to really like and a few things to not like about it: it totally aces the Bechdel test, being full of named female characters who operate as fully functioning adults really liked; two of Conway’s staff call her ‘Chicky Babe’ and ‘Chicky’ really really didn’t like, especially as tolerated by Conway who says things like: “I don’t like cute names for killers.  It trivializes their actions.”  I really liked the writing style: the reader is totally inside Conway’s head throughout with Connor’s use of Conway’s interior / exterior dialogue.  And Conway’s head is a pretty weird place to  be: Faced with a series of bizarre murders, Conway talks to the deceased to find out more about the crimes, mentally communicates with some of the other characters, and communes with an imaginary but handy being who provides vital clues – or maybe he just jolts them into the forefront of her brain.  The supernatural stuff worked OK for me – especially when matched with Conway’s visceral descriptions of her internal and external environments, which give her perceptions real texture – “The thoughts sloshed from side to side and spilled over the edges of my brain”, “A low drone rippled down the wall and undulated across the floor when I stepped into the busy room” – really liked.  The plotting is complex and rips along – liked; there were many coincidental connections between the characters, which was a little disorienting – didn’t really like.  The victims (unfortunately very un-Bechdel) are all young women and all bloodless blondes who have been stabbed in very clean bathrooms, and there are enough clues through the book for you to work out the motive for the crimes – but the solution is so bizarre kudos to you if you do!  The chicklit elements come from Conway’s upcoming nuptials and the personal challenges she faces as she works to solve the crime before more young women are killed.  The whole package is quite zany – and I can imagine you could get into following the … byte series.  Psychobyte also comes with a YouTube trailer: http://bit.ly/2nTwq0k

When I first started reading this book, I was thinking there are only so many stories you can tell – and that this was the one about the guy that gets out of prison, wants to go straight, can’t due to societal stigma and intolerance, so he gets back into the criminal life big time and things do not go well.  The story was being told by ‘the guy’, in this case Mags (Magdeleno) a Salvadoran LA gangbanger. I was enjoying his narrative style – salted with patois that was exotic, but also familiar from all the movies and TV programmes I have seen about LA gangs.  But then, as well as just cruising through the book, I started to become totally engrossed in Mags’ world; the characters Mags engages with are flawed and have agendas, which make them untrustworthy and far from predictable, and Mags himself is a complex character who makes some very bad decisions about what and what not to do.  Mags’ gang is the Cyco Lokos, and while he has been locked up, the ‘shotcaller’ of the gang, Chivas, has also been imprisoned.  Mags was Chivas’ lieutenant, but that place has been taken by Rico – the guy who set Mags up to take his wrap for illegal firearm possession – and with Chivas locked up, Rico is calling the shots.  Although angry at this, Mags has decided to go straight, not wanting to go back inside and also wanting to grow his relationship with Paloma, his best friend’s sister.  But he gets pushed back into gang action – and into confrontation with Rico.  And there is a comfort in this: “Revenge is the regaining of control. There’s nothing so empowering, so elating.”  But truly terrible things occur as Mags tries to set things straight and get his homies back on track, and he starts to realise that the gang code gets more flexible the higher you go up ranks.  If everyone is out for themselves, who can you ever totally trust to be on your side?  Even within his family, his alcoholic father, his hotshot firefighter brother, his Catholic turned Pentecostal Mother, and his sisters, one of whom has got involved with a banger from a rival gang – who will see him for who he is and not just see the gang tattoos that scream out what he is.  The tattoos are a great metaphor “They were a part of me, but not the whole of me”, they are a comfort as they give Mags identity, but they are a burden as they don’t allow others to want to see who he is and to what he might aspire.  Along Mags’ journey, as well as the fear and violence, there are some lovely moments: the family dinner where Mags felt “No matter what had happened in the past, I belonged at that table”, and when Mags’ clica crew sat around telling stories about a dead homeboy “til the wind blew through our clothes and the sea turned nimbus grey”.  Skin of tattoos is full of the inevitability of lost lives; of those who can’t escape the deeply worn tracks of their predecessors, even those “moving up the food chain who thought they were leaving the ghetto behind when they arrived in the San Fernando suburbs, but they just bought the ghetto with them”.  The sympathy Hoag has for her unsympathetic characters is effective – whenever someone does something awful you find yourself thinking not that they are bad to the bone, but that something awful must have happened to them for this to be their reality.  Mags even manages to conjure up sympathy for the despicable Rico: “For an instant I felt sorry for Rico.  Just an instant.”  And it’s those instants that have you rooting for Mags and worrying about him – so, have a read and get to know him.  This is a great debut novel from Hoag, who is an LA-based Kiwi writer.

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 down off a cliff, with his wheelchair and one leg snagged on rocks.  The story goes back through time to explain his predicament, interspersed with updates on the current situation.  The flashbacks often end with more (metaphorical this time) cliff hangers and many of the situations are genuinely scary – so there is plenty to get your adrenaline going.  {Before continuing I will get the one whacky thing I didn’t like about this novel out of the way – the narrator is the author – i.e. Finn Bell, but the narrator is also the main protagonist.  Sometimes an authorial voice will place themselves in a scene of a book – but to make yourself the main character in a gruesome thriller is just weird!}  Finn (character) has fled to the South of the South Island to a remote cottage to escape his life (and possibly end it) after a disastrous bout of ennui that led to drink that led to a car crash that put him in a wheelchair.  There is much about his discovering options in the far South to touch your heart – plus the story is at times as creepy as Mo Hyder at her creepiest – so the heart thumping horror element is there too.  Then Finn’s working through his demons with a 70 something therapist engages your brain as weighty matters of life are discussed.  And within the thriller narrative is the question of whether you should act to right a wrong (to make yourself feel good) or leave a wrong well alone (which might make you feel bad but will protect those you love).  Finn’s cottage is charming and full of old history – plus is as far South as you can get on mainland NZ – so we are in a different place with local history thrown in.  And in this location Finn is emotionally and physically very ‘down’.  But he soon discovers his historical cottage has witnessed a more recent and tragic sequence of events – and that both the ancient and recent history of the place involves a very scary family who live on the adjacent farm.  So, at his lowest ebb Finn finds purpose: in his therapist-assigned homework, his intrigue with the tragedy of a missing girl and her father, his new-found friends and his new found sport – Murderball.  All these are great elements for a novel and for most of the book Bell (author) plots well and I was thoroughly engaged.  I would have liked more Murderball, and there are some oddities – the son of one of the characters for some reason hasn’t started school at age 8?  There are other snippets that ‘ping’ oddly as you read them but they are explained in the final reveal.   And this is the weakest part of the book – the denouement – I found it out of balance with the main part of the book and narrator-heavy.  Also when you do horrible things to victims I think they deserve respect and focus – and I didn’t think one of the main victims was granted these.  But for most of this book I was transported, moved, engaged and thrilled!

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 starting to settle into a new lifestyle in Khandallah, with just his daughter’s cat for company.  But when he experienced a fellow club member being farewelled with just ‘a moment’s silence’ he considers his life and decides to visit the UK and Europe in search of adventure.  Joining a whistle stop bus tour of Southern England he is deciding to branch out on his own, things being a bit tame, when he spies something in the back of a car stopped beneath his window – something that brings him much more adventure than he was hoping for.  Being a good citizen he reports his sighting to the local Cotswolds police – to Sergeant Elizabeth Candy.  What he has stumbled upon is linked to a recent terrorist attack – and the Scotland Yard becomes involved.  Meanwhile we are following Linus, an IRA soldier gone rogue, and his alter ego who does worse things than blow up national monuments.  Linus is a tad unstable and when he realises his perfect plan is coming unstuck, he becomes obsessed with taking out the “nosey parker who’s ruined everything” – Martyn.  When the Police realise that Martyn is their chance to catch the villain, they ask for his help – but he has had enough adventure thank you very much.  However, Elizabeth (Liz) Candy is interesting and attractive, and she convinces him to continue his holiday in the hope of luring Linus out where the police can nab him.  The combination of Linus being skilled, the police not being up to the job, and the relationship between Martyn and Elizabeth blossoming produces a great thriller!  The plotting is tight and the dialogue mostly convincing (I could have done without Liz’s occasionally dropped ‘h’s), and the story unfolds at the pace of a whistle stop bus tour.  And given how sloppy the police work is – both in the UK and in New Zealand – it does make you wonder about the wisdom of acting on your ‘civic responsibility’ if you stumble upon information!  Abbey gives us background on many of the main characters, and even if the leaping backwards and forwards is a little clumsy at times, knowing the characters adds to the tension and the texture of the read.  We don’t get to excuse anything, but we do read of the difference between a psychotic who is drawn to a violent cause, and a lonely kid who finds a home in that cause and becomes a loyal soldier.  The action takes us touring around England and eventually to New Zealand – where Martyn eventually does get ‘a moment’s silence’, but is this one for him or for Linus …?   Read and find out.