Review: The Wrong Woman - JP Pomare - July 2022  Picked up at Xanadu Book Exchange in Papamoa one of my regular haunts for swapping reads. In fact, I'm heading back there tomorrow, and honestly, there's something extra satisfying about finding a great thriller in a secondhand pile, isn't there? Reid never planned to go back. Driven out of his hometown under circumstances he'd sooner forget, he'd made peace with the distance  until a PI job for an insurance agency pulled him right back to the place he'd left behind. He books a hotel, tells himself it'll be straightforward. An open-and-shut case. In and out. But life and small towns rarely cooperate as we all know being readers . What Reid walks into is a tangle of secrets that grows thornier with every thread he pulls. There's a Professor with a wandering eye, a car crash that raises more questions than it answers, and two missing teenage girls whose disappearances seem unconnected until they don't...

Review: The Last Guests - JP Pomare - July 2021  You know how sometimes you pick up a book by an author and you're just not sure what you're going to get? That's exactly where I found myself with JP Pomare's The Last Guests. My relationship with this Kiwi author has been a bit of a rollercoaster, if I'm being honest. His debut left me putting it down unfinished, but then 17 Years Later completely won me over with a solid five stars. So settling in with this one, I wasn't quite sure which version of JP Pomare I'd be getting. Here's the thing about New Zealand fiction that I've noticed over the years we tend to take our cues from the UK when it comes to pacing. There's that slow-burn, atmospheric quality that builds and builds rather than hitting you with the high-octane intensity you often find in American thrillers. Sometimes I love that deliberate unfolding, and sometimes I'm itching for things to move faster. With The Last Guests, I found ...

Review: 17 Years Later - JP Pomare - May 2024 One of my 2025 reading goals is to clear my physical bookshelf and as I also have my e-reader, what I have decided to do is to alternate between physical books and ebooks. So as my first read of the year was an ebook, that means my second read is a physical book. Being on a thriller buzz for the first day of January, I grabbed this New Zealand fiction - 17 Years Later by JP Pomare. One of the things I love about reading New Zealand fiction is being able to imagine the places that the book is set as I know the areas and that helped with 17 Years Later being set in Cambridge, just over the hill from where I live in Tauranga. The book starts with a crime podcaster Sloane Abbot winning an award and then googling herself, she reads a few comments that talk about how she is a one-trick pony and only covers white cases. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, there are talks about a case Bill Karamea who was convicted of murder 17 years ago of an English famil...