2025 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel (nominee)
"All it takes to earn a place at the table is a little help from the deadliest epidemic since the plague."
It’s 1918, in a Wellington that few people would recognise today, and two major events are about to collide: the signing of the Armistice to end World War I, and the soldier-borne plague we now call the Spanish flu. Into this comes Wellington's only female lawyer, leading her group of Sapphist friends as they attempt to strike a blow for women’s freedom. They go head-to-head with the authorities while she finds herself acting as Crown prosecutor in the case of a wealthy socialite’s ‘murder’ of her husband by kissing him.
This powerful, hilarious, and evocative portrait of life in Edwardian New Zealand is the work of barrister-turned-history teacher, Stephen Tester, and will take the reader on an unforgettable journey.
Genre: Mystery
It’s 1918, in a Wellington that few people would recognise today, and two major events are about to collide: the signing of the Armistice to end World War I, and the soldier-borne plague we now call the Spanish flu. Into this comes Wellington's only female lawyer, leading her group of Sapphist friends as they attempt to strike a blow for women’s freedom. They go head-to-head with the authorities while she finds herself acting as Crown prosecutor in the case of a wealthy socialite’s ‘murder’ of her husband by kissing him.
This powerful, hilarious, and evocative portrait of life in Edwardian New Zealand is the work of barrister-turned-history teacher, Stephen Tester, and will take the reader on an unforgettable journey.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Stephen Tester's Kiss of Death