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The Auckland hospo scene in the mid 1990’s – late nights in smoke-clogged cocktail bars after shifts are done, drinking high-end high-alcohol drinks, trying to save enough tips from the night’s work to pay the rent. Betty Asphalt often fails at the latter, and she is in danger of losing her place in the flat she shares with Faith and Alabama. She would not miss Laverne the cat pissing in her room, but she would miss Alabama, her best friend. Also, there is a serial killer on the loose – so best to stick with the familiar.

Truman, an ex, and still very significant to Betty, turns up out of nowhere when she is out on the town one night with Alabama, and ends up in her bed – but not in a good way – and nothing is familiar or sane ever again. Betty and Alabama continue their frenzied existence, Betty an extremely competent waitress at a swanky restaurant, Alabama working in a bar and singing one night a week. Faith takes off to get over the shock that Betty woke up to – leaving Betty and Alabama to ride out the trauma and sort out Laverne.

Two cops are assigned to find out who left Truman in Betty’s bed, a man and a woman, neither of whom seem all that trustworthy. In fact, nobody seems trustworthy – Betty’s world is comprised of bar staff, bouncers, cooks, hospo managers, and dodgy taxi drivers. One taxi driver in particular is acting oddly – but then Betty did hurl in his cab. Even Faith seems a bit suspicious, as does the owner of the house where they flat – who suddenly races back from Australia. As Betty’s memories are coming back like developing polaroids, she and Alabama decide they themselves need to investigate what happened that Truman night.

Betty’s world is hyper, events coming into and out of focus. Every time things start coming clear, another drink seems in order – the reader recognises she is experiencing PTSD, and she has found out that the serial killer targeting women has visited their flat, and he has yet to be caught. As part of the amateur sleuths’ scattergun approach, they visit their old flat, after which it goes up in flames. The attention Betty and Alabama attract from the police unnerves associates who are covering up their own crimes, some of which are on an amazing scale.

Betty and Alabama both have colourful backstories, Betty was orphaned at fifteen, and Alabama is the product of hippie-era free love, with her having two siblings, all three half-sisters to each other. Their colourful mother is still around and plays a part in the story. This background adds credibility to the behaviour of the women, as does the fact that all men are a potential risk to women – and always have been. Reference is made to real cases (disguised) where trusted men become nightmares. The reader fears for Betty but applauds her stubborn refusal to be cowered, even when she suffers physically. Even when the police say the cases are solved, she refuses to believe it. She trusts Laverne’s cat-messages, and Alabama, and that is about it.

Polaroid nights is a hectic and colourful read, you can taste the alcohol, smell the cigarette smoke, feel the grit under rigid contact lenses. You do not want Betty or Alabama to come to harm, and you often change your mind about who may be guilty, or even how many perps there are. There is resolution at the end, but for me that wasn’t the crux of the novel – it was the dangers that surround Betty and Alabama, making them vulnerable but also as strong as steel. After all “sometimes men do these things and you never get the why out of them”. A great read.

Emily Kirkland never felt close to her father, Dr Felix Kirkland. So, when his neighbour calls her from Aotearoa to say her father is struggling on his own and can she return to help, she thinks it would be “easier to talk to him when he’s dead.” However, as she has no pressing commitments in London, she decides to give her father three weeks. As her time with him stretches out, she learns things about him, and the disappearance of the neighbour’s daughter Leah, that leads to her “becoming very, very afraid of the truth”.

Dr Leah Parata disappeared shortly before Emily headed overseas to explore the world. Leah was a brilliant scientist and lecturer. Her research focus was the beneficial effects of 1080 use in the Ruahine Ranges. One day she headed into the bush near the town of Tawanui for research, and she never came out. Her brother Ira, Emily’s childhood best friend, and his mother, Raewyn, never got over the loss of Leah, their shock made worse by Manu, Leah and Ira’s father, having died after a long debilitating illness only two years before the disappearance.

Emily is used to being the one left out or left behind. Her family moved to Aotearoa from Leeds when she was six. When Emily turned eighteen, her mother, Lillian, returned to Yorkshire. The father of her son Nathan “ran like a hare” when hearing of the pregnancy. Her older twin siblings, Eddie and Carmen, were always remote, ganging up on her. They now live successful lives in Auckland and seem to only have inheritance-related concerns about their father. Emily is now forty-seven, back on the family homestead, and her father is disappearing in front of her eyes. Emily is initially shocked to enter his life – finding notes and messages throughout the house reminding him how to use equipment, reminding him of his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.   

Felix’s moods are erratic, ranging from pleasant to distressing to violent. The disarray is even more shocking as “Felix Kirkland, was the most precise, orderly individual that ever walked this earth”. Emily catches glimpses of her father that are a revelation – episodes of her childhood, within which she has always felt lacking, are re-shaped when she hears his recollections. Amidst the confusion of Felix’s life, with his losing his memories and losing his words, are flashes of his old professional self – he diagnoses and treats Emily’s sore neck with kind attention. They spend quality time together, tending the roses, playing chess, and then Felix gives Emily a letter with instructions to open it once he has died, and he starts saying things that Emily wishes she had not heard.

Remember me is a mystery – what happened to Dr Leah Parata? Could she have been murdered – are anti-1080 sentiments strong enough that someone might kill a 1080 defender? Why did many people report seeing Leah with bruises? What is under the built-in wardrobe, with the dog “whining and scrabbling on the floor in there”? And there are more general mysteries – “Where do people go?” Where was the Felix Emily remembers gradually going, while his physically fit body was still there in front of her? Where did Manu go all those months his family were caring for his wasting body? Leah walked along a road that suddenly transitions into the thick bush where she disappeared, at what point do the people you know disappear? Those people whose memories you hold for years, and who turn out to be not like that at all. Emily’s world is like the permafrost she tells her father about – thawing to reveal prehistoric creatures.

“I’d scarcely known my father when he was at the top of his game, let along now that he was turning into someone else.” If Felix is changing, does he still get to make life decisions? There is consideration of agency. If there is a test to detect the possibility of your having a degenerative genetic disease, do you take it? If you have access to information that can seriously affect others, do you share it? Emily is swamped with sudden responsibility, and she thinks of her cohort: “Most of us are just masquerading as adults, aren’t we? All those forty- and fifty- and sixty- somethings, just a pack of school kids in disguise.”

Remember me is meticulously plotted and sympathetically written, you accompany Emily as she re-traverses her memories and tries to reconstruct what has happened in the past. The reader is given clues, and lots of information, some cleverly provided via a documentary crew revisiting Leah’s disappearance. The novel is cram packed with vivid characters you get to care about. There are some sad moments and some warm moments. There are even funny moments when Emily works on her latest project illustrating a children’s book. There is plenty of tension as the mystery unfolds, and it has the most exquisite ending, which I read through tears. Remember me is a stunning book!

Marshall Grade is living in New York, passing his time solving really hard Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzles, when an old buddy from his Brooklyn South, NYPD days, Ray Vialoux, asks to meet him. Ray is deep in gambling debt, and his family are being threatened. Grade knows “Data has a gravity. There’d be a point where he’d learned too much, and couldn’t just walk away from the problem.”

Grade doesn’t get a chance to walk away before Vialoux is lying dead at his feet, shot through the window of the Italian restaurant where they had met. The cop assigned to the shooting, Detective Floyd Nevins, warns Grade that he’s got his pronouns mixed up – it’s not “I’m” or “we’re” responsible for finding out why Vialoux was shot – “Here’s a radical idea. Why don’t you leave me to do my job?” But Grade disagrees and starts to investigate. Although it’s true he does seem to get his pronouns confused – a “him” he tracks down ends up being a “her”, adding another layer of interest to the mystery.

Jordan Mora is from Aotearoa, an ex-PI who has worked with Vialoux. Mora, like Grade, knows that if a guy owes you money, you’re never going to get it if he’s dead – there is more behind the shooting than a gambling debt. Grade is attracted to Mora, and he also has a history with Hannah, Vialoux’s wife. His personal relationships make the case difficult to navigate, as he struggles to see “the divide between the pertinent and the personal.”

It is Grade’s specific take on the case that makes Exit .45 such a good read. We know he has OCD from previous novels, and his condition has heightened to engineering-level geometry. He is crystal clear about what’s happened and his role in it: “… the story is about me, isn’t it? I was right there at the beginning.” He is confused when others seem to put other considerations first: “Vialoux’s dead. I mentioned that, right?” Another source of puzzlement is the people he bumps into who have asked others to do jobs, but who feel disconnected from the consequences.  

Grade has an unusual view of justice, for him it’s not one-size-fits-all, it’s case-by-case, and he has no problem administering it when required: “He was wired for unilateralism, single-mindedness.” Any progress on the case seems to unearth more mysteries, and it isn’t long before he has triggered the interest of Deputy Inspector Loretta Flynn of the NYPD. He is sort of helping the police yet sort of their prime suspect: “But it was a strange experience to be standing here, moving easily through small talk and all the while knowing that a SWAT team might kick down his door.”

In the frame for being connected to Vialoux’s murder are a drug lord with a missing wife and an Italian mob boss. And closer to home there are pieces of the puzzle that don’t quite fit. Is Hannah’s daughter Emma acting suspiciously or just being a teenager? Is the grieving couple who witnessed a suspect for the murder what they seem? Their daughter, Emma’s friend, has committed suicide, and Vialoux was looking into bullying as a possible reason.

Exit .45 – a way out of New York or a wound from a bullet – is a great read with clues scattered throughout and engaging characters. I thought the end was too abrupt until the ramifications sank in – the pieces keep falling into place after you finish reading. And there is Sanders’ lovely noirish prose: “he thought he could bend the bars of honesty a little, slip through to the other side of the mystery.” #YeahNoir!

A woman is waiting at Auckland International Airport for her parents to arrive. She thinks of them impatiently: “Dad off on his walks, and Mum busy with her cousins, her friends, her legions of family.” Adam is on an island somewhere in the Pacific, desperate to get home – his younger daughter, Naomi, is very sick, and he longs to be with her, but things keep obstructing his departure. Eve looks back on her life and her relationships. She is the daughter of a missionary to Samoa who never went back to England. Eve never wanted, and still doesn’t want, to leave the place of her birth, but she determines she must help Adam leave her island – her paradise.

Both Feet in Paradise is an extraordinarily powerful portrait of a man, Adam. His story is told in four sections, with the second and last told from Adam’s point of view. These parts are reminiscent of Ishiguro’s superb The Unconsoled, with the reader struggling to decipher what is going on as the protagonist’s world starts to make less and less sense. Adam remembers the Sagrada Familia in Paris, and he wonders if it was lira he and his wife used as currency there; warped memories of Parisian trips are frequent through the narrative. As are periods of panic as Adam remembers his younger daughter’s illness – her bleeding nose having been the first warning sign.

Adam has nightmare visions of another man usurping him as husband to Ruth, as father to Naomi and his elder daughter, Natalie. Time is Adam’s enemy; when he misses his flight, he scrambles to make new arrangements. But there doesn’t seem to be a working airport on the island. He remembers the general details of many international trips, but not the specifics of how he got to this island. He knows he has visited many countries, but his passport is blank. He starts losing all evidence of his planned flight, documents that would help him re-book. He sees a stranger behind a doorway: “an older man, unshaven, with a scuffed black Nike cap wedged on his head” – it is his reflection.

Everything is alien and unknown to Adam, but also oddly familiar. There are many people who appear helpful, but don’t help. And then he meets Eve – Adam’s temptress, his bully, his only friend. She is ominous, overly familiar, very presuming. When Adam’s credit cards start being declined, she is his saviour. He confides in her; he is an entomologist studying the local butterflies, he urgently needs to get home. He needs to phone his wife to explain why he wasn’t on the plane when she was waiting at the airport, but whenever he gets through it is someone else on the line – always the same person – “I think the world’s gone mad.”

The third section of Both Feet in Paradise is Eve’s story. Her tale is one of powerlessness but contentment. She visited Aotearoa to train as a nurse, and once home she never wanted to leave again. She was manipulated by someone, and the result was a daughter, Naomi. An engineer working on a dam enters her life, and takes her to New Zealand, to Paris. He is good with Naomi, but repeatedly puts her in danger. A nosebleed is an indication that one misadventure is potentially life threatening. Eve lives with the traditional stories of the island, one of which is of Sina who befriends a young eel, who grows and relentlessly pursues her. But Eve is afa Igilisi – as well as the traditional stories, she also understands the “humourless pālagi logic”.

Eve is fascinated by Tusitala Robert Louis Stevenson, a pālagi who visited Samoa and never left. When Eve’s daughter Naomi and her partner Rob visit, they have problems leaving. Her father never left. And of course, there’s Adam. Where do people belong? Where is home? When our lives move on, through choice or trauma, how accurate are our memories? “I’ve never been good with numbers.” Many of Adam’s memories circle around the circumstances of key events in his life – meeting Ruth, Naomi’s birth. Tusitala is a word for storyteller, and Both Feet in Paradise considers where stories come from, and how we can become lost in them.

The descriptions of Samoa are at once peaceful and beautiful, and dark and menacing. There are waterfalls and lush flora, but also the feral dogs that snap and threaten once you leave the town environs – “Why are they so aggressive?”. The imagery of the Garden of Eden helps the warping reality – Eve initially appearing as a seductive temptress, “Don’t worry. We’ll work something out.” Her taking Adam to her favourite places on the island. Him taking her to his butterfly grove – where she is bitten by a ‘snake’. Adam’s situation is one that many novels have attempted to deal with, and for me it is one of the most moving and convincing portrayals: “Yet sadly, no longer am I a part of my own life. Somehow I’ve become lost. No matter how hard I try, I can’t return.” A poignant and haunting book.

Stuart Baker might not want to work for money, but he certainly puts his all into running his multiple cons. They range from extortion to giving less to beggars than he takes from them, and they cover every type of scam in between. His biggest worry is remembering to park his Lamborghini where his impoverished ex-wife can’t see it, that is until he hacks PI Danny Ashford’s credit card. That is probably the moment things turn south for Stuart Baker.

Danny runs Quake City Investigations out of his flat in the still shaky alternate history Christchurch. It’s not just the streets and buildings that are crumbling – the cops are hopeless, and the banks are as dishonest as the many criminals who consider Quake City their patch. Danny can’t afford his rent, or the payment for the new car he needs after his last one was trashed. He acquires an Audi from a dealer, knowing better than to grill him about the car’s provenance.

When lawyer Julie arrives at the agency, wanting Danny to recover the money a fraudster has conned from her, he gladly takes the case. And the coincidences start piling up. Danny discovers he and Julie have been ripped off by the same guy. The Audi used to belong to a thief who Stuart engaged to steal some valuable software. And when Danny acts on behalf of his new neighbour, Chelsea, an exotic dancer at 88 Club, warning her boss to stop harassing her, more connections fall into place.

All is going well with the investigation until Danny ends up at the police station being interviewed – there has been a murder and Danny is the prime suspect. Fortunately for Danny, Julie turns out to be a criminal lawyer and she stops Danny being arrested, if only so he can keep working on getting her money back. Deepa Banwait, a journalist, and crime-busting partner of Danny’s is happy to help, for a story. And Chelsea is generous in letting Danny and his cat Torquemada hang out at her place to avoid the police – and the increasingly rent-needy landlady.

Pressure is mounting – Danny needs to solve not only the confidence crimes but also a murder, and he must do so in time to pay the rent, pay off the car, and avoid getting sent to prison. And both Julie and Chelsea are starting to act very oddly. Then there is another murder, and once again the clues point to Danny. Danny has no trust in the police, he knows he must prove himself innocent. And he must resolve the cons so all the victims get what they deserve, as the Financial Crimes Unit will skim some of the money, and the victims will end up with nothing.

Despite the police only having Danny in their sights for the murders, there is a growing number of other suspects. There’s the bank teller who has worked out where Stuart’s money comes from, his struggling ex-wife who has twin boys to support, a woman whose strip club started failing when 88 Club opened down the street, and the owner of the ripped off software company, who just happens to be a star kickboxer who has the wherewithal to trace extorting phone calls.

To Kill a Conman continues the Quake City Investigations series. Readers who enjoy the cartoonish settings won’t be disappointed, we still have the Richter Mail, Crumblo Street, Ricketyton, etc. Apart from the police interview transcripts, the narrative is first person Danny, and there are other noir tropes: the attractive woman arriving at the down and out PI’s offices needing help, the constant rain, the PI being played … There are enough clues for the reader to work out whodunnit – you will be guessing to the end – and there is the added interest in how Danny will sort out his financial woes, and those of the other victims of Stuart Baker.