“NZ crime fiction is characterised by its distinctive rural and urban settings as well as its often gritty realism,” says book reviewer ANNA CREER.

NZ crime fiction is characterised by its distinctive rural and urban settings as well as its often gritty realism. 

Both Slash (Allen & Unwin) by Gavin Strawhan and Lucky Thing (Text) by Tom Baragwanath prove how gripping NZ crime fiction can be.

Gavin Strawhan is one of the most experienced scriptwriters working in NZ television. His debut novel The Call (2024), featuring Detective Sergeant Honey Chalmers, won the 2023 Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for best novel in the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards. 

Honey Chalmers returns in Slash. She’s still traumatised by the events that ended The Call, has left the police and now works for a dubious firm of private investigators. 

On assignment in Napier, she’s approached by Vinnie Wright who wants her to find his missing son Nick. In 2023, just before the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle, Nick and an accomplice, Oliver Haughton, using a stolen car and rifle, robbed shops and a petrol station down the east coast. Nick was 19, Haughton 16. Haughton was arrested and pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery, but Nick hasn’t been seen since. Now, on social media, Nick is being accused of murdering the owners of the stolen car.

Vinnie’s other son Steve, a policeman, sends Honey the police files on the case and they convince her that Nick’s disappearance needs investigating. 

The Wrights live in Bergeton where Rauku Forestry is the town’s biggest employer. Most of the local farmers have sold their land for pine plantations.

Honey is told: “When forestry came to town everyone thought it was a godsend – jobs, kept the school open”. But the jobs don’t eventuate and the town has died. Then Cyclone Gabrielle washes away the small younger pines and as a result “stacks of silvery slash dotted the hills among yawning slips… slash is a good word for it, Honey thought. Slashing the land, slashing lives.” 

Honey’s investigation becomes more complex when she’s asked by Chucky, a forestry worker, to find one of his crew who had left without warning at the time of the cyclone. Rumours suggest that Timi returned to his native Fiji but Chucky is worried.

Slash is a fast paced story about a fearless female detective uncovering a web of deceit, illicit drugs and corruption in high places reaching from Fiji to NZ and Australia. 

ALTHOUGH he now lives in Paris, Tom Baragwanath was born and raised in Masterton in NZ’s North Island and that’s where he set his debut, prize-winning novel, Paper Cage (2022).

In it he introduced a remarkable woman, Lorraine Henry, strong, principled and loyal. Lorraine has been a widow for 26 years. She grows her own vegetables, admits she’s shaped “like a marrow”, and has a bad hip.

Lorraine works at the local police station in the basement file room, surrounded by stacks of paper and files, her “paper cage”. But her instincts as a detective make her invaluable to her police colleagues, Chief Ambrose and the young and inexperienced Dion.

Lorraine returns in Lucky Thing which begins with two Finnish backpackers discovering a badly injured teenage girl in the nearby forest. 

“A long slender shape, ginger haired, wearing stubbies and an eggshell-blue hoodie. She’s in a hollow, spread out across the leaves, the thick trunks of mattei and beech beyond her”. 

The chief of police calls her a “lucky thing” to have survived the night.

The “lucky thing” is Jessie Mowbrie, of Maori descent, who lives near Lorraine, in the poorer part of town.

Jessie is clever and had recently been selected for the Interschool Debating Team, beating girls from St Aquinas. The team is dominated by boys from the exclusive private school, Langsford.

The night of her assault, Jessie and her cousin Michaela went to a woolshed party at Longbush on the Kelsons’ property.

Stu Kelson is the star of the debating team and the school hockey team.

Lorraine has bitter memories of the powerful, entitled Kelsons and how they tricked her father into selling them his farm, adjacent to Longbush, many years earlier.

The police in Masterton are under-resourced and struggle to investigate against evasive witnesses and powerful vested interests. Lorraine again trusts her own instincts and pursues the truth, despite the dangerous situations it leads her into.

Lucky Thing is a tragic story of privilege, anger and long hidden secrets written in often exquisite prose. It stands as an example of literary crime against those who declare such a concept a paradox.

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