It’s time to stay indoors and let four authors take you to faraway places, writes book reviewer ANNA CREER.

Local author Sulari Gentill will take you to the town of Lawrence in Kansas in The Mystery Writer, where Theodosia Benton arrives unexpectedly to stay with her lawyer brother Gus. 

Theo is supposed to be studying law in Australia at the ANU but she wants to be a writer and hopes to find the freedom to follow her dream in the US.

Gus encourages Theo to find somewhere to write each day and she discovers a local coffee bar, Benders, to work on her historical mystery, set in the 1920s in Canberra. There she meets Dan Murdoch, an established author, who becomes her mentor and eventually her lover, while promising to send her manuscript to his agent, Veronica Cole.

But someone murders Dan and Theo discovers she’s the prime suspect. Gus and his friend Mac, an IT expert, join forces to protect Theo as attempts are made on her life. Then Theo disappears.

At the same time an online group of conspiracy theorists are preparing to save the world from depravity and evil by creating The Shield, led by the mysterious Primus.

The Mystery Writer is complex, intriguing and completely unpredictable, full of twists and turns as the two lines of the plot eventually converge.

GAVIN Strawhan will take you to NZ in his debut novel, The Call, which won the 2023 Allen and Unwin Fiction Prize, which centres around the terror created by bikie gang members deported from Australia.

Auckland police officer DS Honey Chalmers, recovering from a near fatal, brutal attack, has returned home to the remote coastal town of Waitutu to care for her mother, Rachel, who is struggling to overcome the early symptoms of dementia.

Honey is convinced she was attacked by members of the Reapers bikie gang, after she cultivated an informant, Kloe Kovich, the partner of one of the gang members. Kloe has disappeared and Honey fears she is dead.

But the Reapers are not convinced and follow Honey to Waitutu.

Through flashbacks, Strawhan slowly builds suspense towards a terrifying ending. It is an impressive debut.

OR let Andrew Taylor take you back to Restoration England in The Shadows of London, the latest in his James Marwood and Cat Lovett novels.

Taylor is a celebrated crime writer and was awarded the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing in 2009.

The Shadows of London is set in 1671 and Cat Hakesby (née Lovett) is now a widow and an architect. She has been employed to restore the ruins of an old almshouse but building work is suspended when a murdered, disfigured body is found on the site.

Cat knows she needs James Marwood’s help or she will be financially ruined. Marwood works for Lord Arlington, the principal Secretary of State and the most powerful man in the country after the King.

Marwood decides they need to identify the dead man to uncover the motive for his murder but, as they investigate, they uncover corruption at the heart of government and a plot to place a young vulnerable French woman, Louise de Keroualle, in the King’s bed.

Taylor has said that part of his motivation for writing The Shadows of London came from Dr Linda Porter’s Mistresses, which reveals the more important women who shared Charles ll’s bed. Porter’s chapter on Louise de Keroualle describes how her seduction was part of international politics.

For Taylor, de Keroualle was a defenceless young woman barely out of her teens and her seducer a powerful man twice her age. Charles’ pursuit of her was supported by some of the most influential men in Europe. Taylor argues she was as much a victim as those used and abused by Jeffrey Epstein.

OR you could relax with the latest cosy crime novel from Elly Griffiths, The Last Word, a sequel to The Postscript Murders(2020). The beautiful Natalka, the ex-monk Benedict and the elderly ex-BBC presenter Edwin return to investigate the mysterious deaths of a number of authors, all connected to a sinister writer’s retreat near Hastings.

The Postscript Murders may be cozy but it’s also cleverly plotted and filled with empathetic, likeable characters. If you enjoy TV programs such as Poirot, Midsummer Murders and Father Brown, this is the book for you.