Meet Michael Robotham in Auckland on Thursday

As I revealed back in March, award-winning Australian crime writer Michael Robotham is visiting New Zealand this week. Last year Robotham was due to attend the Christchurch Writers Festival, and be part of a panel at the originally scheduled event for the inaugural presentation of the Ngaio Marsh Award, but those plans of course changed due to the September earthquake. Now Robotham will be appearing at Takapuna Library this Thursday evening.

I will be heading along, and giving the intro for Robotham. It should be another fun night at the Takapuna Library, who've made a habit over the past couple of years of scooping some great crime fiction author visits (eg Linwood Barclay, Gregg Hurwitz, Tom Rob Smith, Simon Kernick, Peter James etc).

I had the pleasure of interviewing Robotham for a feature in the Weekend Herald last year, and I'm looking forward to meeting him in person. You can read my Herald feature, "Ghostwriter haunted by his own characters", online here.

You can also read Robotham's 9mm interview with Crime Watch, here.

Robotham's latest thriller, THE WRECKAGE, was released recently. The new book sees the welcome return of ex-cop Vincent Ruiz, who "rescues a young woman from a violent boyfriend but wakes next morning to find that she's robbed him. It was a set up – an elaborate scam. Setting out to find Holly Knight, Ruiz discovers her boyfriend's tortured body and realises that powerful men are looking for the same girl. What did she steal that was so important?

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, Pulitzer prize-winning Journalist Luca Terracini is living 'outside the wire' in Baghdad and investigating a disappearance of billions in reconstruction funds. The trail will lead him to London where he teams up with Ruiz and together they investigate the disappearance of an international banker and a mysterious 'black hole' in the bank's accounts.

THE WRECKAGE is an international conspiracy thriller involving clandestine agents and powerful nations who seek to bury secrets and manipulate the truth. It's about the money, politics and power. Who has it, who wants it and who's ultimately going to pay."

You can read the first chapter of THE WRECKAGE on Robotham's website here.

Have you read any of Michael Robotham's thrillers? If so, what do you think? Will you read THE WRECKAGE? Or come along to Thursday's event? Comments welcome.