JP Pomare Books in Order

If you want the breakout novel first: Call Me Evie → In The Clearing
If you like cult stories and buried trauma: In The Clearing → Tell Me Lies
If you want domestic suspense and tech paranoia: The Last Guests → The Wrong Woman
If you want the full run in order: Call Me Evie → In The Clearing → Tell Me Lies → The Last Guests → The Wrong Woman

J.P. Pomare was born in New Zealand and grew up around Rotorua, where life was a long way from literary glamour. He was the youngest of four kids, raised on a horse-racing farm outside town, with sheep, cattle, chickens and plenty of time outdoors. He is Māori, of Ngāpuhi descent, and has spoken about his family roots in Pouto, at the northern end of the Kaipara Harbour.

Books came a bit later. He has said reading was not a big part of everyday farm life when he was small, and that he only really started to find his way into literature in his teens. A journalism teacher at Western Heights High School helped nudge him toward writing, and that early encouragement seems to have stuck.

That mattered.

After school, Pomare spent some time studying toward a BA in Wellington, but he left before finishing and eventually moved to Melbourne. There he kept working at the craft, publishing short fiction and building a life around writing. He also hosted the podcast On Writing, where he interviewed a wide range of authors and sharpened his own sense of how stories work.

His debut novel, Call Me Evie, put him on the map fast. It follows a teenage girl hidden away in a remote beach town by a man who says he is protecting her, while her memory keeps slipping in and out. Readers responded to the book's tight control, psychological pressure, and the uneasy question at its center: who gets to tell the story of what really happened?

Pomare likes a trapdoor.

That shows up again in In The Clearing, a tense novel about cult life, motherhood, and the way the past can keep living inside the present. Then came Tell Me Lies, which turns a seemingly settled suburban life into a pressure cooker, and The Last Guests, where an inherited lake house and a little extra income open the door to surveillance, exposure, and marital strain. The Wrong Woman pushes into small-town dread, sending an investigator back to a place he hoped never to see again.

Across these books, Pomare returns to some familiar worries. Memory is slippery. Secrets have a long half-life. People reinvent themselves, sometimes out of need and sometimes out of fear, but the past usually keeps its receipt. His stories often sit in New Zealand or Australia, and he has a gift for making wide-open places feel tight, watchful, and hard to escape.

Success came quickly, but not out of nowhere. Call Me Evie won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel, and later books helped cement him as a regular name in psychological suspense. Screen producers noticed too, with In The Clearing adapted for television and other work heading toward the screen.

These days Pomare lives in Melbourne with his family and continues to write crime and thriller fiction at a steady clip. What makes his work stick is not just the twist, though he knows how to land one. It is the way he starts with ordinary people, gives them one bad choice or one missing piece, and then calmly shows how everything can come undone.