How easy is it for a man to simply disappear?

When rural banker Richard Harper is reported missing, DSS John (Archie) Baldrick and DC Ben Travers are drawn into the tangled details of the man’s life. Would Harper really have chosen to leave his seriously ill wife, and abandon his pregnant girlfriend? Or is there a real threat behind the abusive emails he’d been receiving from desperate clients in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis?

On the home front, Archie’s marriage is rocky and his two teenage daughters are giving him all sorts of trouble. The frail but beautiful Helena Harper and her magnificent house offer an oasis of calm as Archie struggles to discover who is responsible for her husband’s disappearance. Has he really been abducted, tortured or killed? Or is Richard Harper himself behind everything that has happened?

Archie and Travers ultimately face a race against time as the case descends into a bewildering morass of obsession, violence and murder.

Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Gifkins Memorial Prize for an Unpublished Novel

Finalist in the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards for Best First Novel

Purchase Links

US – https://www.amazon.com/Into-Void-Christina-OReilly-ebook/dp/B08529J3DY

UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Into-Void-Christina-OReilly-ebook/dp/B08529J3DY

Or readers can email Christina via her website www.christinaoreilly.com or her Facebook page Christina O’Reilly – Author for a paperback copy.

Author Bio –

Christina is an author and proofreader living in the Waikato region of New Zealand. Several of her short stories have been published in anthologies, most recently in Fresh Ink: A Collection of Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand 2019. Into the Void is her first crime novel and was longlisted for the Michael Gifkins Memorial Prize in 2019. It is also a finalist in the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards for Best First Novel.

Want to know more Read the Extract

Introduction: One of Archie’s neighbours, Brian Sutton, has been nagging Archie endlessly about his stolen car. In this extract the burnt-out car has been found on a beach, a find that leads to a disturbing revelation.

 A biting wind blew in from the sea, rustling the grassy tufts which sprouted across the sand dunes. Archie pulled his collar up around his neck and followed Travers down the causeway to the beach. What was left of the car sat in the lee of the dunes, making it impossible to detect from the road. It was a sorry sight, the frame blackened with smoke and all the windows blown out. Here and there a patch of polished paintwork in a colour Brian Sutton had ironically called ‘burnt sienna’ still shone through around the base of the doors.

     A couple of uniformed officers were already there, examining the wreckage. Archie nodded a greeting at them. ‘Have you found anything?’

     ‘Not much, sir. There’s some broken glass on the back seat, from a vodka bottle by the look of it.’ The constable reached into his jacket pocket. ‘And there’s this. It was right back under the front passenger seat.’

     Archie took the plastic evidence bag and looked at it closely. Inside was a silver necklace, rather grey with soot, consisting of two intertwined hearts on a chain. Like something a teenager would wear, he thought. ‘See if we can get some fingerprints off it,’ he said, handing the bag back.

     Half way back up the causeway, he stopped.

     ‘You alright, boss?’ Travers asked, blinking as his too-long fringe flapped into his eyes.

     ‘Yes,’ Archie lied. ‘I’m fine.’

     He had just remembered where he’d last seen a necklace just like that: around his daughter Alicia’s neck.