Joan's Picks: The Bookshop Detectives and The Survivors

The Bookshop Detectives by Gareth Ward and Louise Ward. This is fun and really clever – the authors are former UK police officers who moved to Havelock North and opened a bookshop (Sherlock Tomes). The lead characters have a similar background and their names are a play on Gareth and Louise. They get caught up in a decade long murder mystery which happened in the Hawkes Bay town and which – of course – they try to solve.

The Survivors by Steve Braunias. Steve Braunias is one of our finest writers and his crime related storytelling is incredibly empathetic and insightful. This is twelve stories of crime, disappearance, mystery and intrigue all centred around the very human lives of the people involved. It’s the 3rd (and final) book in a series which he has written along these lines. The others are The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
And joining me now is Joan mackenzie. Good morning, Joan, Hello,
how are you good? Thank you? What have you got
for us today?

Speaker 3 (00:19):
I've got two New Zealand books actually which is really nice.
One is fiction, the other is not. So I'll start
with the fiction, which is called I think it's the
first I hope in a series. I hope these guys
are going to do more books, and I think that
the main title of the Bookshop Detectives is probably going
to be the name of the series, and the subtitle
is Dead Girl Gone Now. This is written by a

(00:42):
couple who own a couple of bookstores in Hawke's Bay.
Their names are garethon Bluise Ward and they have these
lovely independent bookstores which I hope do really well for them.
And they came to New Zealand from the UK some
years ago and they'd been in the police force in
the UK. And the characters in their book have very
similar names, so they're clearly modeled on themselves. Gareth and

(01:04):
Bluiz are the real people in the book. They're gar
and Aloise and they get involved in a cold case
in Hawke's Bay where back in nineteen ninety nine a
young Tamasha schoolgirl disappeared and has never been found. Now,
one day, their publisher's rep turns up to their bookstore,
which is called Sherlock Tomes, so you can see that

(01:25):
this is quirky and witty and a lot of fun.
And she comes in to tell them that a world
famous author wants to launch her new book in their store,
which is a really big deal because this is a global,
international best selling author, and the book is full of
For someone like me who works in the industry, it's
full of clever, little witty things. The name of this

(01:47):
author is Isabella Garante, and anybody who knows their modern
literature will know that there's a very famous Italian also
called Eleana Ferrante. So they've modeled a lot of what's
in this story on real people or real events, and
Isabella Garante has said that they they must launch your
new book. So while they're in the countdown getting ready

(02:10):
for that to happen, a mystery parcel turns up on
their doorstep, which gets them involved, as I said, in
this cold case where they're trying to solve the mystery
of what happened to that girl so many years ago.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
And sorry, no, no, you go oh. I was just
going to move us along, if that was all right,
because I do want you to talk about Steve braun
AS's book, The Survivors. He joined us on the show recently.
He just does write about true crime so well.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
I think he is one of our finest writers. He
is extraordinary the way that he sees the detail behind
things and writes so movingly. He can tell you about
what's going on in a court case or in somebody's life,
and then he can write about the trees and the
sky and the small minutier of life that's going on
around them. He's simply extraordinary. This is the third in

(02:58):
the series, which he probably told you, and it's called
The Survivors, which it's about crime and punishment, but it's
more than that, but it's also about people who've survived
their own circumstances or the circumstances that they've found themselves in.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
No.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
He's the other thing I really enjoyed about the book,
Joan was he talks about the impact that following crime
between years has had on him as.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Well has had on him absolutely, and this I believe
is the last of the books that he's going to
write because he says he just can't do it anymore.
I do just want to make one small analogy. A
lot of your listeners will know the books of Trent
Dalton who wrote Boyce Swallows Universe and Lola in the Mirror,
which I've talked about on your show. He lives in
Queensland and he writes about the dispossessed and the downtrodden

(03:43):
in Queensland. Was incredible empathy and compassion, and I think
in many ways Steve Brawney has does that for our
people in their real lives with extraordinary compassion and empathy.
I love this book. I kept reading bits out to
my husband because it is so well put together and
so well liten.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
I think that's a very good connection to make. Thank
you so much, Joan. Those two books, The Bookshop Detectives
by Gareth Ward and Louise Ward and The Survivors by
Steve braun Ess. And of course you can go to
NEWSTALKSDB dot co dot mz ford slash Sunday and have
it listen to Steve talking about what it has been
like to write about true crime for twenty years. That
was a previous interview that we did.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talk SeeDB from nine am Sunday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio