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If you want to cruise through a tale of classic noir, Blue Hotel is the book for you. The late 1980s, a busted up “old fashioned reporter”, an underbelly of sex-traps and blackmail, characters being hidden away in a mysterious psychiatric hospital. The privileged rich paying their way out of grief and covering for damaged children, and a plot so complex you lose it before it is all drawn together. The plot including a ‘vamp’ – a goth, or maybe a series of them: Blanca, Krystal, Amber, Cherry, Veronica …

The first to lure Ray Moody into the story, is Blanca Nul. She is Danish and makes herself memorable before disappearing, and her disappearance causes quite a stir for journalists, “a missing female tourist was gold”. Most leads as to her whereabout are to nowhere, and the story dies. Then a year later a woman looking and acting like Blanca Nul is seen again – but is it her? Ray, in a characteristic slump, is determined to find out the truth – mainly as a distraction from the wreck of his life.

Ray is pining after his wife, Eva. Is she dead, with someone else, just somewhere else? Her story drips into the main plot from time to time, and she is never far from Ray’s mind. Ray finds solace in drink, before getting badly injured in a car accident. He tries going straight, attending meetings set up by the charitable Welkin Foundation. A lawyer connected to the Foundation has helped him and many of his fellow addicts. Ray continues with his enquiries into Blanca’s disappearance, despite having lost his respectable job for the Examiner and then his less respectable job for the Beacon.

Ray hobbles around on a bum leg, wearing a wrecked overcoat, driving his beat-up car through “New Zealand … a series of wildernesses connected by fast roads”. He has some helpers, such as a librarian who works late watching porn on a computer. Ray prefers microfiche when looking for links between players – he’s got no time for computers and is glad the “news would always be in print”. Another of those who help Ray is an ex-cop, bearing the consequences of living a double life. He’s working for a security company, the same company that seems to turn up everywhere Ray does.

Ray follows the leads he finds, and he ends up in some strange places: in abandoned night clubs, in the homes of the wealthy, in a soup kitchen, in a BDSM dungeon that used to be a pet shop – the owners making the logical shift when they noticed some of their customers were “looking at the large breed gear”. He starts linking people, companies, and proclivities together. “The world was nothing more than gradations of shade: one big long slide from light to dark.”

Ray is careful not to fall into the trap of inadvertently being bribed or being played, but maybe … The plot has people taking on others’ identities, people who have made one bad decision that repeats until they find they are a person they don’t know anymore. People who are addicted, desperate, scared. The title of the book is yet another ambiguity, is it a code for suicide, the scene of a crime, or a place of hiding?

The characters in Blue Hotel are great, finely drawn, and you wouldn’t want to spend time with any of them – unless perhaps the kind-hearted vampire who works as a minder for one of the goths. It is a pacy novel with plenty of tense moments, some in fast cars on wet greasy streets, others in very dark places. The rain is relentless, and the run-down environments are tactile. The plotting builds, goes haywire, and then gets pulled together.

The reader starts to think there are maybe a few too many coincidences, and then remembers the novel is set in Aotearoa and “New Zealand’s such a small country sometimes all you need to do to create a conflict of interest is walk into a room”. And more sinister is the fact that there may be strands of the story that are manipulating Ray, rather than him driving the plot. And who cares anyway when we happen upon lines such as: “In this business it’s all about being close to the ground and Richard could crawl under a snake.”

I loved reading Blue Hotel #YeahNoir!

“We would have done anything for her”: Mrs Price, a glamorous teacher in a Catholic primary school in the 1980s, who has her students in thrall. They yearn to be her pet – a position bestowed randomly on a chosen few, and often withdrawn for no reason. Justine is twelve, her mother has recently died, and she longs to be among the chosen. The story of her and her classmates is one of manipulation, cruelty, and grief. It is told in retrospect by her adult self in 2014 – her memories prompted by a nurse in her father’s nursing home having an uncanny resemblance to Mrs Price.

For bullying and jealousy to thrive in the school, there is no need for Mrs Price. The prettiest girls have a clique. Most of the girls have a crush on the most attractive boy, who is cruel and arrogant, and has an entourage. Racism is expressed openly, often to get a laugh. The children are at the edge of puberty – “Blood was coming” – they know their year of being the oldest cohort is coming to an end. They are children but aware of right and wrong, and there is often conflict between their wanting to belong, and their knowing belonging will mean not doing the right thing. But with Mrs. Price exploiting these cruel inclinations and rivalries, the kids don’t stand a chance.

Justine is so finely drawn; she finds pieces of her mother’s writing around the house, but they start to fade away, just as Justine’s memories of her mother are fading – as events in the story start to get out of control, Justine desperately searches for her mother’s words for guidance. Justine has a close friend, Amy. The girls are almost inseparable, but a wedge is pushing down between them. Justine is torn between having Amy or Mrs. Price in her life – she can’t have both. When the latter seems possible, and Amy asks her why she is lying about Mrs Price, Justine weakly replies, it is because if she tells the truth, “She might not like me any more”.

The reader really wants to help Amy, a child who is losing her friend, and who can’t find anyone to be on her side. Another sympathetically drawn character is Dom. Dom is kind, considerate, and sensible – but then we are reading of him through Justine’s memories, so maybe a rose-tinted view? Pet has the reader often wondering about the reliability of memory. Justine’s memories are of a time when she was grieving for her mother, and she also has a condition that sometimes blanks out her knowledge of events. There is a stunning ambiguity in the text at one point: “And then she said I …” committed a crime – who is the “I”, the speaker, or the person reporting what they said?

There is physical cruelty in the book, at one point Mrs Price illustrates biological regeneration by getting a child (as a punishment!) to maim a live animal. But it is the mental cruelty which is incessant. The children writing: Why don’t you kill yourself, I hate you, I wish you were dead, etc. to the scapegoat of the moment. Mrs Price openly accusing a child of theft, shaming them in front of the class – forcing each child to declare an opinion. And her marking schoolwork subjectively, depending on who she fleetingly happens to like.

There is a vacuum of adult support when any of the children finally asks for help. From the headmaster, staff, from the clergy – even from parents who just want their child to “see out the year without making waves”. It is a book about sacrifice; the sacrifice of forgoing some of the things you want so you can do right by others – or failing to do so. And throughout is the sacrificial symbolism of the Catholic rituals. And the symbolism of Catholic art, which produced for me the most moving sentence of the book: The serpent under the feet of St Michael: “its mouth open to receive his golden spear.”

The manipulation of children, or of anyone, to the point where they are welcoming of abuse is disturbing and enraging. Pet is a tense read, one where readers know early on that there are some awful events ahead. And they come to know that Justine has been haunted by insecurity about her childhood experiences since she was twelve. Memories might be unreliable, but they are also unavoidable. Like that single strand of Mrs Price’s hair caught in a seam of Justine’s clothing – “not even washing had dislodged it”.

Pet is beautifully written: the fading of Justine’s mother’s writing, Amy’s family’s garden gradually succumbing to weeds and disorder. Yet other things persisting: the trauma of a nun who had witnessed the shooting of her whole family, the longing of a woman who was abandoned by her mother as a four-year-old, the innocence and cruelty of children, how malleable people can be due to their yearning to be noticed, to be part of an inner circle. Pet is also a murder mystery, and it is plotted accordingly, with some thrilling moments – mostly to do with a locked room! Pet is an amazing combination of genres, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Lou is a good judge of character – she was a Customs Officer at the airport before yet another wave of “the virus” sent Melbourne back into lockdown, and she was made redundant. Her life now revolves around her nineteen-year-old son, Samuel. She’s suspicious of his girlfriend, Jessica, knowing instantly her perfect manners and sweet smile are fake. But despite her misgivings, she hopes that Samuel is staying with Jessica when yet another lockdown is announced, and he doesn’t return home in time for the eight-o’clock curfew. When she can’t contact Samuel at all, she starts to panic, despite Samuel’s father, Marko, telling her it’s just the alcohol she’s quaffing.

Lou is an interesting character, aware that the life she feels nostalgia for, is “a life I never really had”. Samuel is her focus, yet she is realistic about him and knows he is of an age when he will soon strike out on his own – hopefully eventually with a granny-flat for her. Lou thinks she has raised her son well: “I’d always, always, taught him to do the right thing, to be honest.” Samuel does contact her, but her instincts tell her something is off: “I’m trained to spot these things”.

Getting no help from Marko, who now has a family of his own and sees Lou as a nuisance that threatens their stability, Lou contacts a private investigator to help her find out what has really happened to Samuel. When they find out things are seriously amiss, the PI encourages her to contact the police. The reader discovers there are reasons why she is reluctant to do that, multiple reasons in fact – and finds that Lou herself might not be following her own advice regarding openness: What if the truth doesn’t set you free?

The setting of a pandemic lock-down adds a dimension of claustrophobia and familiarity to the atmosphere. And this is a ratcheted-up lock-down, with police and the military patrolling the streets. And despite there being plenty of traffic around, there are few pedestrians, so being followed home from a permitted exercise session, or seeing the shadow of someone at your door, are very creepy experiences.

The plot races along, with plenty of mis-directions, and reveal after reveal. The reader (well this one anyway) finds themself going back to re-read bits to see how they have misconstrued events. Lou really is the main character, the only other one that gets some depth is Samuel, but fleetingly. Marko is manipulative and selfish, and hard to understand. We find out a bit about Jessica, but don’t get to know her. Given the seriousness of the subject matter, and the horrendously bad decisions that have been made, only seeing things from Lou’s, unreliable, point of view means that heavy subjects are glossed over.

The most disappointing thing for me about Home Before Night is that I read it in paperback form, where almost a third of the book is a “sneak peek” at Pomare’s next novel. So, I was mentally unprepared for the novel ending where it did, as I was holding the heft of the remainder of the book in my hand. I was fully expecting more reveals and twists to come. Despite this, and some lack of depth in the novel, Home Before Night is a good atmospheric twisty thriller. 

Sally Diamond lives on the outskirts of the village of Carricksheedy, Ireland. Peter Geary is living in Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand. Sally is in her 40s, she has been living with her father since her mother died when Sally was eighteen. Her father has kept her quite isolated, due to her being “socially deficient”. Peter was 14 when he and his father arrived in Rotorua, his father keeps him isolated for his own good, telling Peter it was because of his rare health condition: “Dad obviously had a kind heart.”

Sally doesn’t like engaging with others, often feigning deafness during her brief trips into the village. It is only when her father dies that the extent of her disconnect with the world becomes apparent. Sally knew that her parents were not her real parents, but after her father’s death she, and the reader, learn of her unconscionable origins. She receives support as well as death threats – “Hell is where you belong” – from the community. The support comes mainly from those who themselves experience prejudice and bigotry.

We read of Peter as a child in Ireland, and his disturbing interactions with “the ghost” in the locked room next to the one he is often confined to. We read with horror the behaviours he picks up from his father – due to his isolation he has no other role models. When he fled Ireland with his father, Peter did start to wonder about his situation, and when in Rotorua he openly questions his father’s misogyny and racial prejudice. However, there is a fair amount of wilful ignorance about Peter, he only finds agency when he discovers just how deceived he has been.

It is hard to write a review of Strange Sally Diamond and not give away any of the ‘reveals’ of the plot – and that would be unforgivable as it is such a gripping experience to read the book without knowing anything about it. As you read, a complex story unfolds. A story of abuse spawning abuse, of men controlling women and children with physical abuse, mental abuse, and drugs, of the awful plight of young children and young women, of unimaginable cruelty. It is also the story of extraordinary patience and kindness.

As enthralling as the plot is, it is the characters that move the story. As you read, it is hard to tell who is attentive to Sally because they are kind and who because they are psychotic. Who is Mark who appears suddenly with an almost unhealthy interest in Sally’s past? And who sends her Toby the teddy bear? And why does she have such a strong reaction to the bear? The character of Sally Diamond is a brilliant creation, with her idiosyncrasies making her both endearing and downright terrifying.

The arc of Sally’s story reminds me of that of Charlie in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon. As she progresses, she is funny: “Honestly, between therapy and yoga and learning to caress myself, I’ve enough on my plate.” She starts to flourish: “I liked the faint crinkly lines that came from the corners of my eyes when I smiled at myself. I was beautiful”. She starts to despair: “I finally had someone who was mine. I loved him, I wanted to protect him and keep him to myself. I couldn’t have known what he was capable of.”

Peter’s progression is in a minor key and raises questions about whether a person can be created solely by their experiences. Where do extremely bad, and exceptionally good, abilities come from? Peter is relatable but reprehensible. He is raised to think he is special, and he leans into his privilege while knowing right from wrong: “all three of them came out to play, both in my nightmares and in my waking hours … I could have saved them all.” He has that astonishing ability to assume what someone wants and be amazed when they are not grateful when he provides it, “‘I love you,’ I said as I locked the door behind me.”

There is a section in Strange Sally Diamond when the twists stop, when all is explained and when stories match up, almost – the reader knows when self-interest enters the re-telling of events. It is a puzzling time as you read this section, as though a time bomb is about to go off. There is comfort in thinking all the events are explainable, all originating from specific circumstances. And then the tragic tale picks up again, and the reader wonders once more if that is true – are the characters’ histories really a satisfactory explanation for their behaviour?

Strange Sally Diamond is a great disturbing read that haunts you long after you finish reading. It is sad and awful but also manages to be funny, and the author has some fun with a couple of the surnames in the text. There is a good sense of place in Ireland, London, and in Aotearoa New Zealand, and as the story spans many decades, there is a sense of time as well, with the Covid 19 pandemic featuring towards the end.

Part of the horror of Strange Sally Diamond comes from the duration of the various crimes. They are not crimes of passion; they are a way of life for the perpetrators: “The need for connection could never be satisfied by strangers”. The ending of the novel is exceptional, answering the question of nature versus nurture in a creepy way, by way of a piano and Toby the teddy bear!

When an atrocious murder of a pregnant woman is committed in Dunedin, Detective Sam Shephard’s boss wants her off the investigation – he doesn’t believe “because of your own advanced state of pregnancy, that you would be able to remain objective and emotionally detached from this case.” But Sam is not having a bar of it, it’s not that she can’t remain objective or detached, but because subjective and attached is how Sam does her best work.

Expectant deals with the most inhuman and the most human of crimes, those that involve babies. The book scans every case and scenario, from Minnie Dean in the 1800s, convicted of infanticide, through the various cases of new-born infants being stolen. They are taken from hospitals, cars, prams. Sometimes taken by desperate women who have lost children, or by those who can’t conceive or carry a baby to term. And then there are the darker motives, those taken for money, for exploitation, for medical purposes.

And the novel doesn’t shy away from Aotearoa / New Zealand having “some of the worst statistics in the world when it came to the domestic abuse of children”. Sam, who will give birth in just over three weeks, must confront these realities. But her condition, with the odd Braxton Hicks contraction, her frequent need of the loo, and the constant attacks of the munchies, spurs Sam on to find the culprit and their motive. Time is always of the essence in solving crimes, and Sam has her own deadline looming: “This week coming is my last one at work.”

Sam Shephard is one of my favourite crime-solving characters – she is outspoken, clumsy, off-side with many of her colleagues and most of her superiors, but she is caring and empathetic and doesn’t ignore her gut instincts. There are lovely moments in the book, such as when she is talking to the brave young man who, along with his tagging gang, found the dying woman – and who chose to stay with her as she died rather than scarpering with his mates. And when she sits with a young woman and her mother, the young woman having ended up being of interest to the police for doing something terrible, because she had been scared and feeling totally alone.

Sam is a fearless detective, and she is also funny – getting her baby bump wedged between stools and needing to be rescued (“Jesus, Sam, you’re a goon”), having a love/hate but mainly love relationship with her Mum, bantering with her best friend Maggie and partner Paul. Although Sam is a strong character, others are not completely eclipsed – even her unborn child demands attention, already displaying a temperament, much to the annoyance of Sam’s cat. One of the stars of Expectant is Dunedin. The spring flowers, the funky eateries, the oddly shaped streets, and the banks that even added all together couldn’t scrape up a million dollars in cash for a ransom. And the text is so familiar, with its use of Kiwi slang: “It wasn’t a ‘Dunner stunner’ day”, “the dungier the car the better”.

Sam’s respect for the victims and empathy with the perpetrators is compelling – she imagines the emptiness felt by the bereaved and those who have had people taken – the vacuums left by the loss of people, and by the loss of a feeling of safety. The neighbours who no longer know each other or care about each other, who might dob each other in if someone suddenly is seen with a baby, or who might do so in an act of petty revenge.

Contrasted with this lack of information about those near us are the dangers of social media, where it is easy to glean personal information about strangers, and the risk of official electronic records that can be manipulated and inappropriately accessed. Sam’s investment in the case given her pregnancy is a great device, not only on the emotional side, but the practical too – her knowing what it is to be a pregnant woman going through the health system. Sam might be a cipher in the health system, but she refuses to be one in the police system, and the reader feels her outrage when one of her bosses tells her off for contaminating a crime scene – when not to do so would have been an act of cruelty.

“This investigation was starting to feel like a juggling act in which, every few seconds, someone tossed in a new ball” – the plotting of Expectant is lively and intriguing. There is one of those lovely moments when you realise a possible outcome before the protagonist, and you must read about them moving into danger with no way to tell them! And in the final resolution, Sam must make the most amazing choice, a plot turn that would only work with a character as human and complex as Sam. Expectant can be read as a stand-alone, or first go back and read Overkill, The Ringmaster, Containment, and Bound – you won’t regret it!

Birnam Wood starts with mellifluous prose revealing the motivations, attitudes, and self-doubts of three characters who started the gardening co-op that gives the novel its name. Birnam Wood was Mira Bunting’s idea, using unused land to grow vegetables, sometimes without the owners’ permission – some of the produce being donated “to the needy”. Shelley Noakes has always been Mira’s 2IC, and she is getting a bit tired of it. Tony Gallo left the co-op soon after it started five years ago, and has now returned, just as changes are afoot. Changes that will significantly alter Birnam Wood, affect all the characters, and turn this literary novel into an eco-thriller.

An encounter between Mira and billionaire Robert Lemoine triggers these changes. They meet when Mira is scouting out private land adjacent to the alpine beech forest of Korowai National Park. An earthquake has blocked the main pass into the area, killing five people, and thwarting the landowner’s plans to subdivide. Mira is excited at the prospect of setting up an illicit operation there – after all, Owen Darvish, the landowner, was about to be knighted for his contributions to conservation, surely he couldn’t object if he found out – they were an eco-collective after all. But as she is leaving, she encounters Robert, and, like Macbeth on the blasted heath, the fates of all are changed.

Birnam Wood explores hypocrisy through all forms of human action, whether that be political, commercial, or environmental. The motives of businesses launching green programmes, those of young women entering into arrangements with older rich men, those of the ultra-rich who are planning bolt holes in remote locations, are all exposed through the storytelling. Robert is charming and generous, but surely one of the “Crypto-fascist dirty tricksters”? His technology is helping the critically endangered Fairy terns in Northland, but it is also being used for less benign purposes.

Mira is walking the thin line between compromise and sell-out. Owen wants to retire in peace with his knighthood, ignoring his wife Jill’s concerns about his new business arrangements – the land is his through marriage, Jill’s family has owned the land for generations. Tony sees through everyone’s deception but his own – he is on a mission to expose wrongdoing, while dreaming “he saw himself on stage, at a podium, collecting an award”, and when he stumbles onto something so much worse than he had imagined “I am going to be so fucking famous.” Robert has a way with IT, and not much concern with other people’s privacy, but his wealth can be used for so many good purposes …

The plotting of Birnam Wood is like dynamite with a long fuse – a slow burn leading to a massive explosion. The Shakespearean allusion of the title is carried throughout the novel, with guilt-ridden women, unexpected coincidences, choruses of doom, themes of deceit and fate, and a bloody denouement. It is set in 2017, pre-pandemic, pre- the catastrophic results of anthropogenic climate change occurring in Aotearoa as I write this review, and it feels the more prescient as a result. Even the name Lemoine resonated for me – it is the name of the IT engineer who was stood down from Google last year for claiming the chatbot he had helped develop had become sentient and was in need of protection.

Birnam Wood has no innocent characters, except perhaps the endangered Fairy terns in Northland, or the few remaining Orange-fronted parakeets who live in Korowai National Park. And readers are implicit in the crimes too, for being consumers, for being pragmatic, for writing book reviews while parts of the North Island are disaster zones, for using their cell phones. To understand the cell phone connection, read Birnam Wood – you’ll feel part of those who’d “known that he was bad from the start. And still they’d courted his business. Still they’d courted his approval, his respect. Still they’d courted him.” A tour de force literary eco-thriller!