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  • Published: 15 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9781775531838
  • Imprint: RHNZ Adult ebooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 285

The Case of the Missing Kitchen



Accessible, warm and witty, Barbara Else's fifth novel is her most effervescent.

Accessible, warm and witty, Barbara Else's fifth novel is her most effervescent.

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, has 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 her ex-partner, Luke, 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. 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?

  • Published: 15 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9781775531838
  • Imprint: RHNZ Adult ebooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 285

About the author

Barbara Else

Barbara Else is an acclaimed writer and editor whose writing is distinguished by its acerbic wit and sharp observation and is often concerned with ‘bringing women out of the shadows’. In a career spanning three decades, she has written plays, short stories, novels for adults, children’s novels and a non-fiction work, and has edited collections of stories for children. She has held a number of fellowships and residencies: the Victoria University of Wellington’s Writer’s Fellowship 1999; the Creative New Zealand Scholarship in Letters 2004 and the University of Otago College of Education/Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence 2016. She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005. Through her work as a literary agent and assessor, she has discovered and mentored a number of emerging New Zealand writers, many of whom are now award-winning writers in their own right, and she was instrumental in setting up the New Zealand Association of Literary Agents and New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors. She has won multiple awards in New Zealand for her children’s books, including Storylines Notable Book Awards, Honour Awards and the Esther Glen Medal, and has been internationally recognised at Bologna with a White Raven. In 2016 Barbara received the Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal in recognition of her services to children’s literature.

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