Author(s): Barbara Else

NZ Fiction

Is someone murdering the middle-class matrons of Khandallah? Suzie Emmett is a feisty modern Cinderella, a ball of energy who leaves Kate Wildburn (the Warrior Queen) at the starting gate. Suzie, a thirty-seven-year-old single mother, is the youngest of three sisters and a stubborn misfit. While Lara is now going for a top job in the Ministry of Customs and Philippa runs the charity organisation 'Suite Three', Suzie is an on-call chef with a bank account at zero, a fifteen-year-old son in trouble at school and a ballet-crazy seven year old with head lice. Her love life should be great, as she's just won votes from the students across the road as the 'woman they'd most like to sleep with'. But Gifford, her disarming ex-husband, can't be trusted. She still can't talk to Luke, her hot-tempered journalist ex-partner, without an instant argument, and she is on the point of dumping her current lover Caine Smith, the ace police detective. The worst week of Suzie's life begins when Caine summons her to the morgue to identify a woman's body. She arrives home, shocked, to find the place has been burgled - or was it only ransacked? Caine insists Suzie and the children spend the night at his place. Suddenly her kids have gone missing and her world is falling apart. Over the next days, Suzie darts around the city driven by her ferocious maternal instinct and a perverse obstinacy that always seems to prevent her taking the most sensible course of action. Will she get to the bottom of the mystery - and how many mysteries are there, past and present? And what's happened to her kitchen? With break-neck pace and deft plotting, Else doesn't put a foot wrong in this wickedly funny take on the thriller genre.

Barbara Else needs no introduction to NZ readers. She has also sold in Britain, Australia and Germany. In 1999, she was Victoria University Writer in Residence. With husband Chris Else, she runs the TFS Literary Agency and TFS Assessment Service. In The Case of the Missing Kitchen, she draws on her time living in California as well as her subversive observation of human relationships.