Review: CARVED IN BLOOD

CARVED IN BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

Reviewed by Alyson Baker

When Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton stops at an Auckland liquor store for a bottle of champagne, it is supposed to be his daughter Addison has just gotten engaged. Instead, he is suddenly gunned down at the register by a balaclava-clad assailant in what appears at first to be a random act. The getaway car is quickly recovered, containing the cell phone of a young Māori man, Toa Davis, who is immediately the object of an all-out police search.

Jaye’s ex-wife, former Māori detective Hana Westerman, asks in on the investigation. Her instincts suggest that the vehicle was meant to be found, and that Jaye had been targeted. The gun used in the assault is distinctive, and she learns that a local gang leader, Erwin Rendall—who had threatened Hana in the past—owns such a weapon. When Davis turns up dead, the hunt for Rendall is on. Yet when Rendall slips through the dragnet and escapes the country, and in the wake of Jaye’s death, Hana decides to rejoin the force, acknowledging that she has unfinished business still. 

Hana Westerman’s life as an ex-cop in Tātā Bay, working with her dad on a driver training scheme for the local youth, is about to be shattered in many ways: Illness in the family, an impending wedding, a possible new relationship, desperate friends making wrong decisions, and a devastating event that leads to her facing the kind of offender no one “in the history of New Zealand policing has encountered before”.

CARVED IN BLOOD is full of characters that readers of Hana’s previous exploits will know, which makes her experiences this time around gripping, both emotionally and viscerally. Warmth and threat are woven throughout the novel. In the talk of Matariki: a time of reflection, of coming together, of valuing the dead; in the images of Hana being circled by a shark, “Its eyes never leaving her”.

In the wake of an horrific violent crime, Hana is sworn in as a temporary constable of the New Zealand Police. She finds herself once again in the conflicted position of being a Māori cop in a country where “Māori are one of the most incarcerated Indigenous races on the planet”, and she is tormented by the question: “Why the hell did this kid go and get a gun, walk into a shop and do the awful thing he did?”

The answer to that question is complicated and takes Hana to the Moon Lake Bistro and Lounge, a front for high stakes gambling and illicit imports, takes her back to her memories of a highly fortified gang pad, and requires her to visit a storage unit that may hold information that will overturn everything she knows about someone she loves.

There are new characters too, for instance Elisa Williams, head of the investigation. Williams is ex-SAS, having served in Afghanistan – she left when she felt she was part of “a painful and soul-destroying process of witnessing warring nations implode”. And there is Gracie Huia, young, staunch, pregnant, and seriously in need of someone to believe her side of the story.

Hana begins to suspect that the prevailing Police theory of the case is wrong, and gradually finds herself pushed to the edge – literally in one thrilling car chase. She digs deep to find stability: “Hana was trained to kill. But you do everything you possibly can to never pull the trigger.” However, she does find situations in her personal life that require a bit of flexibility – her daughter Addison commenting: “‘Sheesh, Mum … You believe in the rules, until you don’t.”

The plotting of CARVED IN BLOOD starts in slow motion and then takes off like a rocket. The mystery unfolds as the reader immerses themselves in Hana’s world. People both sides of the law will consider breaking it if they are desperate enough – or empathetic enough. Even the villain of the piece, “His mind is a sticky place. Nothing escapes”, is the victim of a swirl of situations, culminating in evil – just as weather conditions collide to form a serious storm with “as much rain in a day as would normally fall in three months” – a tense backdrop to escalating events.

The moral complexity of the characters is reflected by other contrasts. Rats are for many regarded negatively, a word for a snitch or a traitor, in the novel they symbolise horrific things happening in garden sheds – but “The tā moko artist explained – for us Māori, rats aren’t nasty, ugly things. They’re smart as hell … They’re tricksters, man. They can get themselves out of the shittiest situations”. Everything has another way of looking at it – I’ll never again have the same response to anyone suggesting “a visit to the Desert Road”!

One of the most poignant contrasts is that between those who are sent off in an unadorned wharenui and those who are sent off by tens of thousands at Eden Park. However, the novel makes the point that all lives become equal at Matariki: “All year long the navigator of the canoe collects the souls of those who have passed in a net. Then the waka disappears, and when it emerges again, the souls are released. And they become the new stars.”

An excellent continuation of the Hana Westerman series, CARVED IN BLOOD can be read as a stand-alone, but if you haven’t read the previous two instalments, you really should! And the novel finishes with indications of a next book in the series – great!

Alyson Baker is a crime-loving former librarian in Nelson. This review first appeared on her blog, which you can check out here. 

"An exquisite thriller and hell of a ride" - review of KING OF ASHES

KING OF ASHES by SA Cosby (Flatiron Books, June 2025)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together.

Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

What more can we say about Virginia author SA Cosby: a superlative storyteller who ‘broke through’ during COVID after a long apprenticeship working on his craft, and who’s brought a welcome blue collar African American perspective to rural noir alongside a great touch for character and action?

With superb novels like Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed he has catapulted himself in a few short years to the highest echelons of top-quality crime writing, along with New York Times bestseller status and shelves creaking under the weight of many awards.

Cosby writes terrific stories, and terrific sentences, and that’s on show once more in his latest novel King of Ashes, a thrilling and dark take on a twisted American Dream cum Shakespearean tragedy.

Roman Carruthers is living the high life in Atlanta, a financial advisor to the stars, when he’s called back to his hometown by his sister Neveah when their father ends up in a coma following a hit-and-run incident. Maybe not an accident, given their younger brother Dante’s deep debts to some very, very dangerous local gangsters. The Carruthers family was built on fire; their parents began their own crematorium business, only for their mother to vanish following an affair. Many in the town, believe their father put her body into the flames. Some in their family, too.

Trying to hold together the family that he’d left behind, Roman quickly finds his brains and charm may not grant him easy passage with the ultra-violent gangsters who’ve infected Jefferson Run.

But can he buy his way out of trouble with his financial wizardry? He and Dante fall into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse that pushes them to the darkest parts of their personalities, while Neveah is determined to uncover the truth behind their mother’s disappearance; can the siblings survive?

In King of Ashes, Cosby crafts an exquisite thriller; the pages whir by on superb prose. Guilt, sacrifice, and family secrets collide. Everything burns, Roman’s father used to say, but will he have to cast his own soul into the fire to save his family? 

Building to a cataclysmic finale, Cosby once again propels readers on one hell of a ride. 

Excellent. Highly recommended for crime/thriller readers who can handle a bit of the darker stuff.

[This review was first written for Deadly Pleasures magazine in the United States]

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.

Review: FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD

FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD by Lee Murray (The Cuba Press, 2024)

Reviewed by Alyson Baker

Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.

All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pākehā writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit húli jīng as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories.

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history.. 

“You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope … You will give them flesh and make them real” – Lee Murray, a “New Zealand-born Chinese Pākehā”, tells nine tales of women of the Chinese diaspora, women who were either the victims of and/or perpetrators of unconscionable crimes in Aotearoa. How did these atrocities occur (and they did occur), and how did stifled women get the spirit to act?

Murray frames her stories as tales of the morally ambivalent húli jīng, a nine-tailed fox. But a húli jīng out of her milieu. Not travelling from China to Korea, where she would have switched into a gumiho, or to Japan where she would have morphed into a kitsune. The narrating Fox finds herself awaking in Aotearoa, a land where no embodied fox has ever set paw – “turning your hazel fox-eyes instead to the bright wax-eye that is flit-flit-flitting from flax to fern, to the sturdy black wētā trudging up the trunk of a nearby ponga tree … you curl your claws in the softening detritus.”

Out of her environment, the Fox, like the girls and women in the tales, is unable to enjoy the beauty of her new world – she is from a different culture, speaks a different language, she “becomes a lonely spectator of life”. She cannot run free, she is confined to the lives of the nine women. This is because she longs to travel to heaven, and “she cannot know her true place without first experiencing the agony of living. It is the eternal contract”. There is only one way: “Nine tails. Nine tales. Nine mortal lives.” And what tragic lives they are.

“Whose skull will you wear?” The tales are of women from different times and at all stages of life, from baby, to girl, to young woman, to adult, to elderly. All the women are confined and lacking agency. As well as their spirits being the húli jīng, Murray also terms the women penjing, which became bunjae in Korea, and usually known as the Japanese bonsai – wild things dwarfed and shaped by humans.

The women are all seen as of value only for their capability to procreate or carry out menial tasks. Education, aspiration, potential, all having no place in their lives, or if they do, they are quashed as the women mature. And this cycle of extinguished hope flows through the generations. The Fox is always there as a silent witness, apart from when she bushes her tail “beneath stiff cotton”, or gnashes her “tiny sharp teeth in distaste”, when “for an instant, you become your true self. You lift your head, and flick your ears”.

FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD talks of the burden of a culture when it can’t be embraced, when it traps you rather than empowers you. In this “New Gold Mountain” you are only seen as: “An almond-eyed difficulty.” Any flicker of personal life is taken, as are any children you bear: “It is the way things are, the way things are destined to be.” You have no property, and if you do manage financial independence, you are always aware of shadows in the dark: “They exist everywhere. Not a woman, since women understand the rules, and any woman who has a problem with you would approach you in the daylight … Only men skulk in the shadows.”

The tales are all sad and bleak, they wear down the women and drive the Fox to explosive rage: “All these years your fox-bones squeezed into places they didn’t belong.” These are not tales of women who are ciphers for all Chinese women. One is, like Murray, “one-part willow and one-part manuka”. They are tales of those who became snippets in Papers Past, or whose stories appeared in the national media. They are tales of women whose spirit has waned: “The gods were right all along. You are a no-good woman and a waste of rice.”

The book is beautifully constructed, prefaced by poetry, and contrasting the tales are the smatterings of short couplets they include: “tuatara / steps on a rock”, “frost on the grass / late for work”, “lifting a rock / the slaters scatter.” The Fox, after: “All these years imprisoned in a domed skull cage. Surrounded by ghosts”, comes to a revelation that her difficult journey to heaven, her life in this far off lonely alien land, has been all about bearing witness – just like Murray’s novel. 

I found FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD wonderfully conceived and executed.

Alyson Baker is a crime-loving former librarian in Nelson. This review first appeared on her blog, which you can check out here. 

"Intriguing seeds for an ongoing series" - review of NIGHTSHADE

NIGHTSHADE by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin, 2025)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

#1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a new cop relentlessly following his mission in the seemingly idyllic setting of Catalina island.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.

Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, Stilwell doggedly works both cases. Though hampered by an old beef with an ex-colleague determined to thwart him at every turn, he is convinced he is the only one who can bring justice to the woman known as “Nightshade.” Soon, his investigation uncovers closely guarded secrets and a dark heart to the serene island that was meant to be his escape from the evils of the big city.

Nearly a century ago, the world of mystery fiction had four ‘Queens of Crime’ in the form of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham. Nowadays if we were to recognise a quartet of crime writing royalty, or a ‘Mount Rushmore’ of modern masters, if you will, then surely Michael Connelly would be on the not-too-long list of main contenders.

For almost forty years, Connelly has been taking readers into the gritty underbelly of the City of Angels, first as an award-winning newspaper reporter then inarguably one of the modern masters of crime fiction, setting a high bar across nearly 40 novels, many featuring iconic detective Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch. As the Bosch: Legacy streaming adaptation, starring Titus Welliver as the eponymous investigator, finishes its excellent ten-year run, Connelly has continued to expand his fictional universe. Nightshade introduces a new hero, and a new California setting.

Thanks to department politics and an unerring ability to step on the wrong toes, LA County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has swapped the prestige of homicide investigations on the mainland for low-key policing on rustic Catalina Island. A land of exiles and misfit toys. Law enforcement in golf karts.

But when the body of an unidentified young woman is pulled from the harbour, Stilwell can’t resist encroaching on the murder investigation being led by his nemesis. He knows it could put his career at risk, and more, but he ploughs ahead to uncover the truth.

Like watching a brilliant musician perform onstage, who makes things seem far easier than they really are, there a deceptive effortlessness to Connelly’s storytelling that belies the high level of craft. Nightshade unfolds in a smooth narrative, speckled with telling details about character and place, incorporated with practised ease into an intriguing, page-turning mystery storyline. Detective Stilwell is an intriguing hero – like former ‘Late Show’ detective Renee Ballard, who’ll soon be spinning off into her own screen series, he shares a dogged determination, moral centre, and sense of justice that has made fans flock to Connelly’s Harry Bosch books for decades, while still being a different character rather than a pale imitation.

Connelly plants some intriguing seeds for an ongoing series, perhaps. Coupled with his evocation of Catalina Island – place and people – it’s another very good read from an exceptional storyteller who shows no signs of resting on his laurels or putting things in cruise control.

[This review was first written for Deadly Pleasures magazine in the United States]

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.

"A storyteller with talent to burn" - review of DEVIL'S KITCHEN

DEVIL'S KITCHEN by Candice Fox (Forge Books, 2024)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

This tight-knit, four-person unit has worked together to save countless lives and stop out of control fires before they cause major destruction.

They've also stolen millions from banks, jewelry stores, and art galleries. Under the cover of saving the city, they've used their knowledge and specialist equipment to become the most successful heist crew on the East Coast.

Andy Nearland is the newest member of the unit, and she's helping them prepare for their largest heist yet -- New York's largest private storage facility, an expensive treasure trove for the rich and famous. She's also an undercover operative, and keeping her true motives hidden proves more and more dangerous as the day of the heist approaches.

Candice Fox burst onto the Australian crime writing scene ten years ago with Hades, a darkly sparkling debut about a Sydney detective hunting a brutal killer, newly partnered with the enigmatic Eden Archer, who’s half of a spooky sister-brother duo of homicide cops raised by a master criminal. That debut won Fox the first of three Ned Kelly Awards, among many accolades the prolific Sydney author has earned. One of the modern Queens of Aussie Crime, Fox has written multiple series and standalones, teamed with James Patterson on New York Times bestsellers, and seen her terrific ‘Crimson Lake’ trilogy set in Far North Queensland turned into hit crime drama, Troppo, starring Thomas Jane and Nicole Chamoun.

Fox has storytelling talent to burn, and that’s again on show in Devil’s Kitchen, a page-whirring tale of a freelance undercover officer infiltrating a close-knit NYFD firehouse, and a group of ‘New York’s Bravest’ who among dragging people from burning buildings and performing other heroic acts in the face of raging infernos, have stolen millions from banks, jewellery stores, and art galleries. 

When Ben, one of the firefighters, suspects his comrades may be responsible for his girlfriend and her young son vanishing without a trace, he reaches out to the authorities, willing to give up himself and his crew in order to find them, and save their lives. If they’re still alive. Enter Andy (Andrea) Nearland, a badass undercover operative who works for various law enforcement agencies, and has the chameleon-like ability of Jarod in The Pretender to rapidly get up to speed with portraying someone new, even highly skilled people operating in fields that require years of training. Together and apart, Andy and Ben try to find out what’s happened to his girlfriend and her son, before the crew builds up to its biggest and most dangerous heist yet. Meanwhile an FBI Agent ghost from Andy’s past is keeping too-close tabs on her and the operation, potentially putting everyone at risk. 

Fox does a terrific job dropping readers straight into an incendiary storyline, even if the life-or-death prologue then leap back to learn ‘how did we get there’ setup isn’t really necessary to hook us, given her storytelling talents overall. Andy is a unique and fascinating crime fiction character, with action-thriller skills, plenty of smarts, and a mysterious past that goes beyond the usual tropes. As a good man who’s done bad things but is willing to sacrifice himself for others, Ben is also an intriguing viewpoint character. Fox switches readers between Andy and Ben, as they try to find out the truth, while trying to hide their own truths from Andy’s firefighter colleagues, and each other. 

I tore through Devil’s Kitchen in one sitting; it’s a ripsnorter of a read that still has plenty of meat on the bones in terms of character and quality writing. Fox will get your adrenalin going, but also make you think with the dilemmas and issues the characters’ face. She brings some depth and understanding to the actions of even the key antagonists and ‘villains’, along the way, and makes you care about many involved, despite their dark deeds. While barely ever taking her foot of the gas. 

A recommended read.

[This review was first written for Deadly Pleasures magazine in the United States]

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.

Review: STRING THEORY

STRING THEORY by Bing Turkby (2023)

Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

Dana Osborne just wants to hang out in her guitar store talking music with her assistant Brody, and her colourful customers. But when once-famous prog-rock band Cranial Bypass decide to put on a reunion gig in her small town of Rockingham West, things get unexpectedly hectic. Especially when the band's guitarist Apocalypse BusLane is found murdered at a rehearsal. 

Despite being warned by the Police to keep her nose out of things after the last time she helped crack a case, suddenly Constable Wade McNeish is back, asking her to help out. Dana's quiet life is about to have the volume turned up to eleven, as Wade asks her to find out what happened -- by joining the band!

STRING THEORY is the 2nd in the Guitar Store Mysteries, and the first I've read. Which I think might have been a bit of a mistake. This worked, in that it was fun, a bit silly, and a bit of giggle in places, although it did take me a while to figure out who was who and how it all fitted together. Maybe the first book, DEAD MAN'S AXE will fill in those gaps when I get to it on "MtTBR that can be seen from the moon....".

Set, unsurprisingly, in and around Dana Osborne's guitar store, where she would be happy just hanging out, talking music with an eclectic range of customers, and her assistant Brody, Osborne has a habit (it seems) of getting involved in murders. In the first book it was a local music teacher, in this one it's star of once famous prog-rock band, Cranial Bypass, Apocalypse BusLane (yes I know but to be fair, it's prog rock so let us never forget Marillion and Fish ...).

Anyway Cranial Bypass are in Rockingham West for a reunion gig when BusLane is murdered at a rehearsal. On the one hand Osborne's warned to stay out of things, on the other hand Constable Wade McNeish is asking for her help (and it's probably here that I sort of wished I'd known the backstory), but anyway, long story short, the pathway to finding out what happens is Dana Osborne on the inside - a member of Cranial Bypass (she's one seriously good guitarist - did I mention that).

It's one of those slightly hectic, try not to concentrate on too many of the convenient plot points, roll with the punches, have a bit of a laugh styles of crime fiction that's good for the soul sometimes. Good enough that the first novel is sitting in the wish list subsection of the ridiculously large MtTBR list now.

Karen Chisholm is one of Australia's leading crime reviewers. She created Aust Crime Fiction in 2006, a terrific resource - please check it out. Karen also reviews for Newtown Review of Books, and has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and Ngaio Marsh Awards. This review was first published on Karen's website; she kindly shares some of her reviews of crime and thriller novels written by Australians and New Zealanders on Crime Watch as well as on Aust Crime Fiction. 

Guest Review: RETURN TO BLOOD by Michael Bennett

RETURN TO BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster, Jan 2025 paperback)

Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

After the perils of a case that landed much too close to home, Hana Westerman turned in her badge and abandoned her career as a detective in the Auckland CIB. Hoping that civilian life will offer her the opportunity to rest and recalibrate, she returns to her hometown of Tātā Bay, where she moves back in with her beloved father, Eru. Yet the memories of the past are everywhere, and as she goes for her daily run on the beach, Hana passes a local monument to Grace, a high school classmate who was murdered more than twenty years ago and hidden in the dunes overlooking the sea. A Māori man with a previous record was convicted of the crime, although Eru never believed he was guilty.

When her daughter finds another young woman’s skeleton in the sands, Hana soon finds herself awkwardly involved. Investigators suspect that this is Kiri Thomas, a young Māori woman who disappeared four years earlier, after battling years of drug addiction. Hana and her daughter Addison are increasingly captivated by the story behind this unsolved crime, but without the official police force behind her, Hana must risk compromising her own peace and relationships if justice is to be served.

Following on from the excellent first novel in this series, BETTER THE BLOOD, RETURN TO BLOOD is centred, once again, around Hana Westerman. Only now she has turned in her police badge, abandoning a career as a detective in the Auckland CIB, she's returned to her hometown of Tātā Bay to do some running repairs. On her own psyche which is battered and bruised, on her relationships with extended family which are fractious and strained, and to spend time with her beloved father, Eru. Not that everything about Tātā Bay is a happy memory, there's a monument to her high school classmate that she runs past daily, a Māori man in jail for that murder, despite Eru's misgivings about the conviction.

All of which ends up interwoven with a more current case when Westerman's daughter Addison finds a skeleton in the sand dunes. There's something about the backstory of this victim - a young Māori woman who had led a difficult life - that pulls Westerman and Addison into this investigation, despite neither of them having an official capacity, or even any direct connection with the victim.

Michael Bennett's style in these novels (the third, CARVED IN BLOOD due out mid 2025) is a combination of investigation of crime, interwoven with cultural and community implications. In all cases, Māori sensibility, community and interactions are forefront, often with clear illustration of how incompatible, cack-handed and unnecessary colonial methods are in communities looking for tradition, culture and resilience.

The cast of characters revolving around Westerman, her daughter and her friend, the elders in their Māori community, relatives and long-term friends, as well as her ex-husband, and his new family are an interesting bunch, as is the way this sort of blended and extended family works. There's tensions between everyone, and there is a lot of understanding and acceptance along the way. Westerman's position in the sandwich generation is also clear - her father potentially failing, her daughter still finding her way, there's something universal about that depiction of the generation caught as the carer between kids and parents, each with very different requirements. It's a particularly interesting portrayal in someone who so patently doesn't have their own act together in so many ways, creating an interesting triangle of need between the three age groups.

There's a well known adage about second novel syndrome, and there are a few glimpses of that in RETURN TO BLOOD. It's a bit inclined to wander at points, higher on emotion and the personal, than perhaps the crime and the criminal. Aspects of the case plot were a bit predictable, feeling a little padded to allow for the personal issues being addressed. This might be an issue for readers who are on the lookout for plot dense, action focused crime fiction. For those who are prepared to take their crime with their personal, to have a look at the development of a character who arrived on the scene with a massive thump in the first novel, RETURN TO BLOOD will have them awaiting the third book very eagerly indeed.

Karen Chisholm is one of Australia's leading crime reviewers. She created Aust Crime Fiction in 2006, a terrific resource - please check it out. Karen also reviews for Newtown Review of Books, and has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and Ngaio Marsh Awards. This review was first published on Karen's website; she kindly shares some of her reviews of crime and thriller novels written by Australians and New Zealanders on Crime Watch as well as on Aust Crime Fiction. 

"An atypical amateur sleuth" - review of HELL'S BELLS

HELL'S BELLS by Jill Johnson (Black & White, 2024)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

Eustacia Rose's life is beginning to return to normal: she is back teaching at UCL and her relationship with Matilde is blossoming. But when a man is found dead with a needle in his neck, that fragile peace begins to crumble. Eustacia finds a painting of herself with a syringe next to her neck and discovers that there are other people who seem to know more about the killing than they are letting on.

The threat around Eustacia only increases as a PhD student begins to stalk and harass her to gain access to her poisonous plant collection. After Eustacia continually refuses, he contacts a lab that is illegally selling synthetic plant toxins but turns up dead shortly after. As the body count rises, Eustacia has no choice but to investigate the deaths in earnest.

But murders aren't the only thing on her mind as interactions with a new detective cause tensions with Matilde that Eustacia has no idea how to resolve. What's more, run-ins with a mysterious white-haired women are making her recall long-buried memories. Eustacia must solve the mysteries of her past and this case if she wants to escape from this toxic situation unscathed.

Eustacia Rose is not your typical amateur sleuth. When we first met her in Devil’s Breath (published as The Woman in the Garden in the United States), she’s prickly, awkward, a disgraced professor of botanical toxicology hiding away from the world while tending a rooftop garden full of poisonous plants and regularly spying on the comings and goings of her attractive neighbour. A gloriously eccentric loner who’s as much a mystery herself as the crimes she gets caught up in. While her captivating first outing was a BBC Between the Covers pick and dual Ngaio Marsh Awards finalist, it did feel like Eustacia Rose’s story deserved to bloom for more than one season.

So it’s great to see her back in Hell’s Bells, the second mystery from Brighton UK-based Māori storyteller Jill Johnson. This time Professor Rose has returned to teaching at University College London, only for a sudden death that looks like a possible poisoning and a stalker-ish PhD student with eyes on Eustacia’s poisonous plant collection to upturn the life she tries to keep well in order.

When the student also turns up dead, Eustacia feels compelled to investigate.

Johnson, who used to run a leading UK comics store (and later studied for a degree in horticulture), has crafted a wonderfully unusual heroine. Blunt yet unintentionally hilarious at times, fearful yet brave, Eustacia and her relationships with others, often botanically categorised, deliver a fresh feel to the intriguing mystery storylines. A very good read that cements Eustacia Rose as one of the more interesting series characters to appear on the crime and thriller scene in recent times.

This is a growing series (a third, Belladonna, will be published in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand later in 2025) that will delight classic mystery fans, and those who love quirky, eccentric detectives..

[This review was first written for Deadly Pleasures magazine in the United States]

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.