A NEW Zealand thriller and a story of lifelong friendship make for great winter reading.
In Better the Blood, Hana Westerman is a tenacious Maori detective juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland's Central Investigation Branch.
When she is led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a secret room. As Hana and her team work to track down the killer, other deaths lead her to think they are searching for New Zealand's first serial killer.
With little to go on, Hana must use all her experience to try to find a motive to these apparently unrelated murders. What she eventually discovers is a link to an historic crime that leads back to the brutal bloody colonisation of New Zealand.
When the pursuit becomes frighteningly personal, Hana realises her heritage and knowledge are their only keys to finding the killer.
But as the murders continue, it seems the killer's agenda of revenge may include Hana - and her family.
Fellowship Point is the masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives.
Celebrated author Agnes Lee is determined to complete the final volume of her Franklin Square novels; and to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point.
To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. One of those shareholders is her best friend Polly Wister, who has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature.
She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons; but what is it that Polly wants herself?
Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes's resistance can't prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.
Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett; Fellowship Point, by Alice Elliott Dark (Simon and Schuster), RRP $32.99 each. Out now where books are sold.
