Inside New Zealand’s booming obsession with crime fiction
Saturday, 20 June 2026
New Zealanders love the thrill of a thriller, writes Bess Manson.
Some good news has arrived in the form of an email. It’s from the library. A terrifying and grisly thriller awaits my collection. Huzzah!
The little grey cells are already gearing up to work out who did what to whom and why - I’m not talking Colonel Mustard with a candelabra in the salon, more sociopath with arsenic on the commute.
Thrillers are my thing.
I’ve enjoyed being freaked out by Dean Koontz. I’ll admit to being cheerfully perplexed by Agatha Christie. I’ve had to call time on a Stephen King horror in the dark hours.
My criteria is simple but non-negotiable: It must keep me guessing till the end. And I don’t object to a happy ending, so long as I’m scared witless before we get there.
I’m in good company. A great many of us thriller/crime novel-loving readers hunger for this kind of escapism. Perhaps it’s the chance to solve a crime that, god willing, would never happen to us in real life. It’s preferable to ‘meet your demons in a book’ as one writer suggests.
The thriller/crime and its myriad subgenres - classic mysteries, straight out thrillers, psychological thrillers, spy novels, legal thrillers, historical mysteries, cosy crimes, police procedurals - are devilishly popular in these complex and challenging times.
This year there have been 5967 titles published worldwide, with that number expected to reach 10,000 by the end of 2026, according to James Bennett Ltd, a supplier of books to libraries in Australia and Aotearoa.
That’s up from 7519 in 2024, and 9824 last year.
Crime and thriller fiction is the ultimate in human drama, says award-winning author Vanda Symon. And she should know. She’s penned many thrillers, which have been published here and abroad.
There’s so much depth to crime fiction, she says from her home in Dunedin where she occasionally convenes the Dunedin Crime Writers Association in a downtown boozer.
“There’s a victim and all the surrounding impact [the crime] has on the family, the community, even the perpetrators. People get so enveloped in the social, political and physical environments.
“It’s also just escapism. Living a slightly more dangerous life vicariously through fiction. Isn’t that the reason we read fiction - to escape into something, somewhere else?”
Readers like, and expect, a happy ending where justice is served, she says.
“In the real world you see these things happening and you don’t know if justice will ever be served. There’s a sense of hopelessness that comes with that. But in fiction you know that yes, there is this terrible thing playing out before your eyes but you get the chance to see how the detective, or whoever else is solving the crime, finds those pieces, brings them together so at the end you feel there has been justice.”
Aotearoa has a growing stable of thriller writers setting their stories on these shores and in the process establishing our own New Zealand Noir genre.
Scandi noir thrillers helped readers to love reading crime fiction in a particular place, says Symon.
“That’s helped writers in different countries because readers are looking to experience another place through their reading.
“My publisher said to me ‘Vanda, could you please try and make [my books] more Kiwi.’ These are magic words to me. There were days when we were told that everything had to be homogeneous, or that you’d only get readers in the United States if your books were set there. I hope that is changing.”
The Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime fiction has given more visibility to this kind of storytelling, says Symon.
You see that in the number of people entering that award, which has vastly increased since the first one, and has in turn helped with the legitimacy of the crime genre.
We can thank Craig Sisterson, the Kiwi lawyer and literary reviewer who founded them in 2010.
One of the inspirations behind it was a discussion Sisterson had with a quill of Canadian crime writers who asked which New Zealand writers in that genre they should read.
Sisterson was a little stumped. Apart from the late Dame Ngaio Marsh, regarded as one of the ‘queens of crime’, Paul Thomas and Chad Taylor, he went a little blank.
“When I came back to New Zealand I discovered Paul Cleave, Vanda Symon, Paddy Richardson and I thought, oh we do have these writers coming through… and it’s snowballed since then and I don’t know whether the awards are a correlation or if they play some measure of causation.
“We went from 10-20 entries a year for the first few years to 25-30 and now, pretty consistently for the past several years it’s up to 60-plus. If you lump in the YA category it’s close to 85-plus different books.”
Another drive to create the awards was that every English-speaking country except for New Zealand and Belize had a crime fiction award, says Sisterson.
“I thought, we’ve got this good crime writing in New Zealand [but] it’s never really going to have a shot in what is now the Ockham Awards, which are fantastic but no matter how well written they are, books that have murders or serial killers would never get a look in there,” he says, though this is changing slowly. Michael Bennett was a finalist in 2023 with Better the Blood and Becky Manawatu’s Auē, which has crime among its themes, won the best fiction award in the 2020 Ockhams.
“It seemed like there was a gaping hole in New Zealand. We didn't have a crime writing award, whereas our peers did. We had the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for sci-fi and fantasy, Romance Writers of New Zealand have their own awards.”
There can be incredibly good writing in the crime genre, he says. “I think that’s why the literary popular fiction world gets it wrong sometimes.”
London-based Sisterson says crime fiction is like a modern social novel in that it’s an incredible prism with which to examine society. Not every crime novel does this but a lot of good ones do.
A detective can go anywhere in society, “from talking to street workers and the homeless to interviewing billionaires”, he says.
“They can take readers through the whole of society. There are not many other roles that can do that. Journalists can do it somewhat and sometimes journalists are heroes in crime fiction. Having those kinds of roles, those kinds of heroes, those kinds of set-ups allows you to explore society and that’s something I love about crime fiction.”
If you look at Michael Bennett, his book Better the Blood, goes deeply into the themes of post colonisation - the ongoing effects 150-200 years later of colonisation on Indigenous people, he says. Vanda Symon’s Sam Shephard detective series has themes of agriculture in rural New Zealand, animal welfare, and science.
“Crime novels and psychological thrillers can go into society or deeply into individual minds. You can take people into the mind of the detective, a killer, or into the community. Crime fiction allows authors to do a lot more than they thought 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
As a writer, Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) says he wanted to tackle broader issues alongside the solving of a crime.
“I want to talk about social issues, issues for me as a Māori writer and artist, issues as a country and where we are in terms of Indigenous relations around the world. [For] all of us writers who are part of this strange thing called the crime writing community there’s this common thread - with the narratives we have we are able to talk about all this stuff beyond just the story.”
Bennett, who won the Ngaio Marsh Award in 2025 for Return to Blood, was recently on a panel with indigenous writers S A Cosby and Angie Faye Martin at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
What they are doing as writers of colour working within this genre is very similar, he says.
“Ultimately, we are talking about racism and poverty and the inequality of wealth. We are talking about the same things and it’s really cool to recognise you are part of something that’s bigger than your own writing.”
When his book was shortlisted for the Ockhams in 2023, it felt like a massive breakthrough for everyone in the crime/thriller community, he says.
They felt like they were being recognised as writers, not just genre writers. It’s not the second-class citizen of the genre anymore, he says.
“If you love writing, it’s a very varied and authentic genre. You can hold your head up and say you're a crime writer and not have to mumble it under your breath.”
The fact that a lot more crime stories are being based in Aotearoa is encouraging, he adds.
At recent international book festivals over the past six months, he noticed how people responded unanimously to having another culture, another territory, another precinct open up to them.
“They really want to read and experience something recognisable, but also unlike anything they have read before. As a Kiwi writer you have to speak from your own heart. You can’t pretend to be someone else. People can smell inauthenticity. If you are a New Zealand writer, don’t fight that. Embrace it. If you’re a Māori, Pasifika - what’s the story you can tell that no one else can tell?”
Each year Penguin’s biggest-selling book is always the new one by Lee and Andrew Child, followed by Richard Osman, James Patterson and Freida McFadden. Those four authors make up a significant chunk of their sales, says Becky Innes, director of Penguin Random House New Zealand.
Two years ago Penguin published the first in the bestselling Bookshop Detectives series by Louise and Gareth Ward, who are Hawke's Bay-based bookshop owners. The first two have been optioned by South Pacific Pictures. The third book is due out in July.
Cosy crime is a hit because we live in such uncertain times, Innes says.
“It’s relaxing to read stories where there is a tidy ending. There’s room in the cosy crime category for playfulness and wit.”
Louise and Gareth Ward tapped into their previous careers in the police and their new life as bookshop owners to create their crime series.
Louise Ward says they have absolutely seen an increase in New Zealanders’ love for this genre.
There’s a strong interest in ‘Kiwi Noir’, she says. Part of the appeal is the puzzle-solving element to a good thriller/crime book.
“You’re working out what has happened along with the detective or journalist or private eye - whoever it may be. There’s good brain exercise, good brain food in that. I think people like crime because it’s escapism, isn’t it? You put yourself into scary situations in crimes in which, hopefully, you would never have to face in real life. Meet your demons in a book.”
In the last 10 years the crime and thriller category within fiction has sat at about $10m with a noticeable 16% bump in 2025 to $11.5m. This accounted for 28% of all fiction sales, and 8% of all book sales tracked through NielsenIQ BookScan.
If the growing number of entries into the annual NZ Booklovers Award are anything to go by, then our love of the thriller is booming, says Karen McMillan.
She’s the director of the website which is a hub for anyone who’s into books, reviews and interviews with authors. When the awards started out nine years ago, 12% of entries were from writers of the crime/thriller and its subgenres. This year it's 45%.
“Over the past year or so I have had a lot of authors saying to me that their publishers and agents are actively encouraging them to write in this particular genre.”
Crime and thriller novels, depending on the year, make up about half the number of books published by Allen & Unwin New Zealand, says director Michelle Hurley.
There’s definitely an appetite for this kind of story.
“It’s escapism. It takes you into another world, one which you are unlikely to inhabit. I think that’s part of the appeal. It’s also a good space for people who are writing their first novel because of the really tight structure. It teaches you plotting and pace and tension, all those really important things.”
Often their big sellers of the year will be writers like American author Michael Connelly and Australia’s Chris Hammer. Locally Gavin Strawhan, who won the Allen & Unwin 2023 Fiction Prize for The Call, was sitting at the No 2 spot in the New Zealand Fiction Bestseller list for his latest thriller, Slash.
This year’s prize is going to another suspense novel, Anne Cleary’s The Nowhere Boy.
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New Zealand crime author Catherine Lea is currently writing her 10th book. She says there are so many divisions in this genre that they all branch and merge.
Initially, romance was the genre du jour. Grim dystopia did very well for a while but that got a little close to the truth, she says.
Lea, who started out setting her stories in the US with her Elizabeth McClaine series and now sets her books in the Far North with the DI Nyree Bradshaw as her main protagonist, has been reading crime since she was a child.
“My mother read Mickey Spillane and Ed McBain and I just naturally picked up the same [types of books]. I understand the genre, the tropes, what readers need in a good mystery or thriller. I don’t understand the tropes in any other genre. I could make more money in romance but I’d kill somebody on the first page.”
Lea reckons crime stories have taken off but the good stuff has to fight for space in a sea of ‘rubbish’, she says.
“A lot of people put a first draft up there and think they are really going to be writing the next great American novel. Someone told me there are 4000 books going up on Amazon every day, and that’s because of AI. If you just feed it with all the books that are out there, AI will do mash-ups … It’s like mad cow disease. They fed cows with cows, and eventually they died.”
The little grey cells are getting to work now: It was AI, with the cow, in the paddock.
Now that’s terrifying.
Thrillers a hit for Kiwi library book borrowers
The thriller/mystery/crime/true crime genre accounted for 30% of digital checkouts each year across Christchurch city libraries over the past five years - in 2025 that added up to 296,647 books. American author Freida McFadden wrote nine of the top 10 thrillers in the libraries’ top ten digital checkout list for this year.
Almost 32,000 crime/mystery/thriller eAudiobook and eBooks were loaned from Wellington city libraries in 2016. That number had more than quadrupled to 128,626 last year, not including 159,766 physical book loans. Mysteries made up 53% of adult fiction physical loans last year and 67% so far this year.
Titles in the crime/thriller/detective/mystery genre have long been among the most popular parts of the Auckland Council libraries collection. They account for a significant proportion of adult fiction lending and a substantial share of the total adult fiction collection across all formats: physical books, eBooks, and eAudiobooks. In the last year just over 34 percent of physical books and eAudiobooks/eBooks checked out were crime/thriller related (those numbers are similar for the first four months of 2026). Among the three most popular of 2026 to date (checked out as physical books) are Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, Lee Child’s Exit Strategy and New Zealand/Domestic Noir writer Rachel Paris’ See How They Fall.
Five recommendations to get your thrills
The Nowhere Boy, by Anne Cleary. This story, where the lines of love and obsession are blurred, follows the vanishing of 3-year-old Oliver, known as Apple Man, while on a fishing trip with his father.
My Husband’s Wife, by Alice Feeney, is a story of obsession and deception. A woman goes out for a run only to return to find her key doesn't fit and a person answering the door says she is her husband’s wife. A cracking premise.
Softly Calls the Devil, by Chris Blake, is a crime thriller set in an isolated settlement of Haast on the wild West Coast where a sole-charge constable investigates after discovering the body of his predecessor who had been looking into a murder-suicide from 1978.
Dear Debbie, by Freida McFadden. Columnist Debbie Mullen has been giving advice to New England women for years, but when her life hits the skids she decides payback is in order and starts to follow her own advice to make men pay for their sins.
A Case of Mice and Murder, by Sally Smith, is the first in a new cosy crime mystery series set in 1901 in the hidden heart of London’s legal world. Barrister Gabriel Ward is our sleuth and his first case begins with the discovery of a body on his doorstep.
Look out for
The Bookshop Detectives 3: Murder and Mojitos, by Louise and Gareth Ward (July 7)
We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman - (September 15)
No Prisoners, by Ellis Blake (July 21)