The Ngaio Marsh Awards, which celebrate excellence in New Zealand crime writing, announced its 2024 longlist last week (more here). Get acquainted with the longlisted titles below. We've also included a few prime suspects from Ngaios past (winners from 2023, 2022 and 2021) for your investigation, deliberation and reading pleasure.

Longlisted in 2024

Dice by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)
Four teenage boys invent a sex game based on the roll of a dice. The police charge them with multiple sexual offences against three teenage girls. Kete reviewer Greg Fleming writes ‘after reading it, many readers may question whether trial by jury remains the best way to try such a case …’

The Caretaker by Gabriel Bergmoser (HarperCollins)
Bergmoser ‘displays his talent for establishing disquiet and setting up the reader to expect terror at every turn,’ writes Books + Publishing reviewer Ilona Urquhart.

Ritual of Fire by DV Bishop (Macmillan)
Writing for The Post, Karen McMillan says Ritual of Fire is ‘a genuinely tense thriller with historical details that make you feel you are walking the dangerous streets of Florence.’

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Writing for Kete, Sam Finnemore says ‘the lush psychological description that was so prominent in The Luminaries returns here, with the modern setting lending a sharper satirical edge.’

Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
‘It’s worth being unsettled by one of our greatest writers,’ says Dionne Christian in her Kete review, calling Pet ‘provocative and layered.’

El Flamingo by Nick Davies (YBK Publishers)
Judges of the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction 2024 (which El Flamingo won) said Davies’ debut is ‘exhilarating... so perfectly paced and plotted’.

Double Jeopardy by Stef Harris (Quentin Wilson Publishing)
Reviewing on NZ Booklovers, Karen McMillan calls Double Jeopardy ‘page-turning’ and writes that she’d like to read more books centred on its ‘big-hearted, complex main character’, Frank Winter.

The Quarry by Kim Hunt (Spiral Collectives)
The first in Hunt’s Cal Nyx series, The Beautiful Dead, was a Ngaio Marsh finalist in 2021.‘A great depiction of how people on the margins live dangerous lives, how hard it is to participate in society once society decides you don’t fit,’ writes Alyson Baker on kiwicrime.blogspot.

Devil's Breath by Jill Johnson (Black & White/Bonnier)
Toxic plants, a reclusive botanist, a missing woman and a murder… On the Newton Review of Books Karen Chisholm says Johnson’s writing ‘perfectly reflects Rose’s eccentricity and neurodivergence’ and that the toxic plant information is incorporated ‘elegantly’.

Going Zero by Anthony McCarten (Macmillan)
A beta test for find and locate government technology offers a competition with high stakes on both sides… ‘All the ingredients of a great thriller,’ writes Louise Ward for the Napier Courier.

Home Before Night by JP Pomare (Hachette)
The book’s lockdown location, according to The Guardian, makes ‘a neat setting for a frantic domestic thriller.’

Expectant by Vanda Symon (Orenda Books)
On NZ Booklovers, Karen McMillan says knowing she’s in Vanda Symon’s ‘excellent hands’ makes a premise she might ordinarily avoid (a killer targeting pregnant women) engaging and gripping.

Winners: 2023

Best Crime Novel: Remember Me by Charity Norman (Allen and Unwin)
In his Kete review, Greg Fleming writes that Charity Norman is one of New Zealand’s ‘best-kept literary secrets’. Remember Me captures ‘the simmering tensions in a family and how they fester over time’.

Best Nonfiction: Missing Persons by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)
‘Missing Persons sees Braunias dwelling in the shadows, relationships unravelling, both fascinated and appalled by the men he writes about … a riveting, one-sitting read,’ writes Greg Fleming for Kete.

Best First Novel: Better the Blood by Michael Bennett (Simon and Schuster)
‘Alongside the political and cultural issues, Bennett gives us a compelling and action-packed thriller full of diverse and engaging characters,’ writes Greg Fleming for Kete.

Winners: 2022

Best crime novel and best first novel: Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (Allen and Unwin)
Greg Fleming’s verdict for Kete: an ‘enthralling debut’ which ‘entertains as readily as it questions and challenge our cultural obsession with dead girls.'

Winners: 2021

Best Crime Novel: Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson)
Uther Dean, writing for the Spinoff, says that Gnanalingam’s ‘ensemble novel’ on ‘toxic masculinity, patriarchy and rape culture’ is ‘a meticulous and immaculate book, one that, bolting through a minefield, never puts a foot wrong’.

Best Non Fiction:
Black Hands: Inside the Bain family murders by Martin van Beynen (Penguin Random House)
Award-winning journalist Martin van Beynen has covered the Bain story closely for decades. Following on from his 2017 podcast, Beynen considers the evidence old and new, the mysteries and motives, interviewing never-before-spoken-to witnesses and laying out the complex police investigation and judicial processes.