Into the Void
How easy is it for a man to simply disappear?
When rural banker Richard Harper is reported missing, DSS John (Archie) Baldrick and DC Ben Travers are drawn into the tangled details of the man’s life. Would Harper really have chosen to leave his seriously ill wife, and abandon his pregnant girlfriend? Or is there a real threat behind the abusive emails he’d been receiving from desperate clients in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis?
On the home front, Archie’s marriage is rocky and his two teenage daughters are giving him all sorts of trouble. The frail but beautiful Helena Harper and her magnificent house offer an oasis of calm as Archie struggles to discover who is responsible for her husband’s disappearance. Has he really been abducted, tortured or killed? Or is Richard Harper himself behind everything that happened?
Archie and Travers ultimately face a race against time as the case descends into a bewildering morass of obsession, violence and murder.
Retribution
A young woman has been murdered on Ripton Beach.
DSS ‘Archie’ Baldrick and DC Ben Travers eventually identify the body as that of Lucy Martin, who has been renting a bach in the area. Her husband, Oliver, seems to know very little about his wife or her background.
What was Lucy hiding? Why has she no family or friends?
As the number of suspects mounts up, Archie begins to conclude that the real answer lies in Lucy’s dark and mysterious past, and that the murderer may be just a little too close for comfort …
A Virtuous Lie
Hidden in the dense bush of the Manawatu, a tiny skeleton lies overgrown with weeds.
DSS Archie Baldrick and DC Ben Travers discover that the victim is a young child who went missing from a rural skate park twenty years earlier. Who could possibly have abducted Lukas Branson and kept him hidden for over two years?
The detectives have their hands full following up old leads − and opening up old wounds. Then there is a murder in the city centre and suddenly their investigations become doubly complicated …
The Missing – For Children Aged 10-14+ Years
Two teenage boys. Two very different futures. One hundred years apart.
After his father is killed in a boating accident, 13-year-old Sonny and his family move to the seaside town where his Gran lives in a nursing home after accidentally setting her house on fire. In an attempt to fit in at school, Sonny becomes involved with a group of wayward local boys. Gran’s derelict house is ripe for exploring, especially as a place for Sonny to escape to, and here he finds a hidden blood-stained diary: the diary of Jack Baker, who joined the army at age fifteen, in 1915.
Sonny becomes engrossed in Jack’s story while his own life runs along parallel lines – both boys become involved in situations they are not quite ready to handle. Jack’s experiences at the Somme and Passchendaele tell the heartbreaking story of underage soldiers in the First World War, a story which ultimately helps Sonny to come to terms with his own personal tragedy and the preciousness of his future.