Ben Atkins was only seventeen when he finished the first draft of his novel set in the Great Depression and Ray Berard was considerably older when he received the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel in 2016. Dinah Holman and Tina Shaw fit somewhere between these two categories. Holman interweaves real and fictional crimes in a romantic novel set in nineteenth century New Zealand. Shaw is perhaps best known for teen fiction, but in this crime story she combines fly fishing with crime in Turangi.
