Reaper - Vanda Symon | Blog Tour Extract | #Reaper @vandasymon @OrendaBooks @RandomTTours

Homeless on Auckland’s streets, Max Grimes fights to survive when someone starts killing the city’s forgotten. Pulled into a dark past, he must stop the killer – or be next. The gripping second instalment in a breathtaking series, from New Zealand’s queen of crime.

The City looks away … but someone is watching…

A killer is hunting Auckland’s homeless. No one cares. No one but Max. These are his people.

Max Grimes is homeless, living on the streets of Auckland – among the forgotten, the invisible. But now someone is hunting the homeless, killing them one by one. No one cares. Except Max.

Trying to put his shattered life back together, Max is pulled into a deadly game when a face from his past reappears, reopening wounds he thought were long buried.

As whispers of a Grim Reaper spread terror through the city, Max must race against time – not only to find the killer, but to outrun the ghosts chasing him.

Because if he fails, he’ll be next.

Reaper is published by Orenda Books and published in ebook, audiobook and paperback formats (12 March 2026). It is book #2 in the City of Shadows series. My thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours for the tour invite. For my turn today, I’m delighted to share an extract.

EXTRACT

The shadows shimmy and fracture as a shape slips across the opening and melts into the blackness opposite. He has been tracking this creature for two weeks now, his quarry oblivious to the attention, instead absorbed in his world of acquiring cheap booze, scavenging for food and bumming cigarettes. If ever there was a case for getting scum off the streets, it is this man. He is loath to call him a man, to bestow upon him that title implies there is some worth, some redeeming feature that warrants it. From what he has observed this trash is a blight on society. Even among his fellow homeless and rough sleepers he is someone who is feared and reviled. Removing him is going to do everyone a favour. One less bum on the streets, one less blight on the city.

Darkness has descended and the life and buzz of the shop assistants and office workers – the legitimate – is replaced by the night shift: the sex workers, the nutters, the degenerates, and those who have let themselves sink so far as to become the lowest of the low. The bottom feeders, as one significant leader has referred to them, handing a mandate to those who have the means and the balls to take care of business. People like himself.

The prey wobbles a booze-fuelled shuffle down the lane, settling on a spot under the entranceway at the rear of a building. He sits down with his pathetic bag of belongings. He pulls out a sleeping bag that even in this poor light is clearly stained with god only knows what. The shadow watches, waiting while the prey settles in, arranges his treasures around him as always, including a framed picture of a woman, presumably the woman who spawned him, and a battered houndstooth flat cap, strategically placed for any coins that might drop his way.

Just the biscuit tin to go, he thinks, and sure enough, the red ANZAC-day memorial tin with its stained-glass-style poppies emerges from the bag. The lid is prised off and filthy fingers extract a tarnished mouth organ. Moments later the mournful sound of shit harmonica-playing drifts through the air, surely driving people away, not enticing them to drop money into the cap. Putting an end to this godawful din will be a public service.

He glances around, checks for prying eyes before he pulls the hood further down over his head and strides down the laneway. The bum startles as he comes to a stop before him. His head eclipses the streetlamp behind, throws shadows over the street-weary face. The harmonica falls from the scum’s lips.

He reaches into the pocket of his long great coat, notes the bum’s eyes following his hand and widening with alarm. The look of fear transforms into a look of desire as the piece of shit takes in the hip flask of brandy that emerges. The bum’s hands reach out, tentative at first, but then greedily as he realises the offering is intended for him.

‘Keep warm, old man.’

The bottle is snatched from his grasp.

‘Bless you,’ comes the reply, ‘bless you,’ the lid already being twisted off, the flask rising to eager lips.

The hunter turns and exits the narrow lane, merges back into the shadows.

‘Keep safe,’ he mutters under his breath, a grim smile spreading across his face. ‘Keep safe.’

Vanda Symon is a crime writer from Dunedin, New Zealand, and the President of the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa. The Sam Shephard series,which includes Overkill, The Ringmaster, Containment, Bound, Expectant and Prey, hit number one on the New Zealand bestseller list, and has also been shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award, as has her then standalone thriller, Faceless. Overkill was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and Bound and Expectant have been nominated for USA Barry Awards. All six books have been digital bestsellers, and are in producLon for the screen. Vanda lives in Dunedin.