Christchurch Noir Crimes

4 primary works

The Cleaner

by Paul Cleave

Published 11 December 2012

'Cleave uses words like lethal weapons' New York Times Book Review

'Dark, bloody, and gripping ... classic noir fiction' John Connolly

An international bestseller and one of the top-selling novels in New Zealand's history, Paul Cleave's dark thriller is a brilliant, bloody masterpiece.

Joe is in control of everything in his simple life - both his day job as a janitor for the police department and his "night work." He isn't bothered by the daily news reports of the Christchurch Carver, who, they say, has murdered seven women. Joe knows, though, that the Carver killed only six. He knows that for a fact, and he's determined to find the copycat. He'll punish him for the one, then frame him for the other six. It's the perfect plan because he already knows he can outwit the police.

All he needs now is to take care of all the women who keep getting in his way, including his odd, overprotective mother and Sally, the maintenance worker who sees him as a replacement for her dead brother. Then there's the mysterious Melissa, the only woman to have ever understood him, but whose fantasies of blackmail and torture don't have a place in Joe's investigation.

The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

Published 23 April 2013

'Anyone who likes their crime fiction on the black and bloody side should move Paul Cleave straight to the top of their must-read list' Mark Billingham

'Pulse-pounding' Publishers Weekly

'Cleave uses words like lethal weapons' New York Times Book Review

Cleave keeps us guessing until the last page of this fantastic psychological thriller.

Imagine waking up covered in blood - but it's not your blood. There's a nasty bump on your head, and you can't remember a thing about last night. The morning paper reports that two young women were brutally murdered. You recognize their names. Pieces of the night before come back to you through the haze. And now you're the suspect in their grisly deaths. Welcome to Charlie's world.

In this heart-pounding thriller, only the dead know what happened last night. On the run, Charlie suspects a man named Cyris, but no one believes that Cyris exists. Not the police and not Charlie's ex-wife Jo, though she wants to trust that the man she once loved is innocent. Soon, Charlie has Jo bound and gagged in the trunk of his car, fleeing across the countryside while the killing hour approaches yet again.

Blood Men

by Paul Cleave

Published 20 July 2010

Edward Hunter has it all-a beautiful wife and daughter, a great job, a bright future...and a very dark past. Twenty years ago, a serial killer was caught, convicted, and locked away in New Zealand's most hellish of penitentiaries. That man was Edward's father. Edward has struggled his entire life to put the nightmares of his childhood behind him. But a week before Christmas, violence once again makes an unwelcome appearance into his world. Suddenly he's going to need the help of his father, a man he hasn't seen since he was a boy. Is Edward destined to be just like him, to become a man of blood? A true master of the genre that only comes along once in a generation, Cleave unveils a brutally vivid picture of a killer's mind and of a city of fallen angels captured at the ends of the earth.

Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

Published 26 July 2011

People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn't make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn't make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a six-month prison stint, he's asked by Green's father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them know is that a former mental patient is holding her captive as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs. Now he has acquired the ultimate collector's item-an actual killer.

Meanwhile, clues keep pulling Tate back to Grover Hills, the mental institution that closed down three years ago. Very bad things happened there. Those who managed to survive would prefer keeping their memories buried. Tate has no choice but to unearth Grover Hills' dark past if there is any chance of finding Emma Green and Cooper Riley alive. For fans of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs, and Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series, Collecting Cooperis a dark, entertaining crime thriller from a glimmering new talent.