Dream debut continues for Ben Sanders

What a month it's been for young North Shore crime writer Ben Sanders.

Over the past few weeks he and his debut novel, THE FALLEN, have been featured by several of New Zealand's biggest media players (eg the Weekend Herald, the Sunday Star-Times, TVNZ), and mentioned in several others as well, and now for the third week in a row THE FALLEN sits atop the New Zealand Adult Fiction bestseller list!

You can watch a short 5mins long clip of Ben Sanders being interviewed by Paul Henry and Pippa Wetzell on Breakfast, the popular TVNZ morning show here. For those of you outside of Australia and New Zealand, I understand a Kindle edition of THE FALLEN is due to be released on Amazon.com in September.

Paul Thomas's IHAKA TRILOGY (Old School Tie, Inside Dope and Guerilla Season) also holds its place at #3 in its third week on the charts. With Alix Bosco's SLAUGHTER FALLS also out now, Donna Malane's SURRENDER coming out in September, and the publicity being generated about New Zealand crime fiction in the lead-up to the presentation of the inaugural Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, at The Press Christchurch Writers' Festival, in just two weeks' time, hopefully Kiwi readers will continue to give our locally-written crime novels a go.

Have you read THE FALLEN? Are you intending to? Do you think it's a contender for the 2011 Ngaio Marsh Award? What other great Kiwi crime have you read this year? What are your thoughts on the increasing publicity and prominence (relatively speaking) of Kiwi crime fiction lately? Long overdue? A cause for optimism? A false dawn? Thoughts and comments welcome.