The great indoors

As the peak of winter approaches, books editor Mark Broatch and our reviewers pick their favourites of the year so far and point to tantalising titles to come.

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THRILLS & CHILLS

Some first-class Kiwi thrillers have been a hallmark of 2025. In Rachel Paris's Sydney-set See How They Fall, homicide squad detective Mei O'Connor investigates a poisoning at the grand estate of the Turner dynasty. Jennifer Trevelyan's A Beautiful Family finds a family on a long summer holiday, in which the youngest, Alix, pairs up with a boy named Kahu to find a girl who disappeared in the area a couple of years back. In Michael Bennett's Carved in Blood, set during Matariki, retired detective Hana Westerman is faced with a new case and lots of twisty surprises. Gareth and Louise Ward's Bookshop Detectives are going strong with the second in their cosy-crime series, Tea and Cake and Death, and Liam McIlvanney is back with missing-child chiller The Good Father. Just out is King of Ashes from SA Cosby, the award-winning author of Southern noir crime novels, in which a son returns home to Virginia and must protect his family. Also recommended is Belinda Bauer's The Impossible Thing, a page-turner thriller about birds' eggs, and Callan Wink's tense, compelling Beartooth, about two tree-chopping brothers in backwoods Montana who are made a lucrative, risky offer. Also new for crime aficionados is Murderland, a readable, lyrical account of a spree of American serial killers in the 1970s and 1980s from a Pulitzer Prize winner. But hold on to your rosary beads - there's a new Dan Brown coming in September. In The Secret of Secrets, symbologist Robert Langdon must use all his arcane knowledge - while being stalked - to find an academic who goes missing in Prague. Also out that month is a new Thursday Murder Club from Richard Osman. In