Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara

Format: Audio (BorrowBox)
Read: May 2026

I found this scrolling through my library’s available audiobook offerings by New Zealand authors. The blurb and handful of Goodreads reviews were intriguing and sounded right up my street!

This is a bit of a slippery genre-bending book, and you know I love that. It starts off as a crime story with a literary bent, but before too long, we end up in speculative territory with even a little bit of magic realism sprinkled in. There is a lot more going on in this story than first meets the eye, it’s for some big ideas under the hood: love, desire, loss, regret, fragility, time, and reality.

Our protagonist is Lestari, a thirty-something tattoo artist living in Auckland. She, Jasper, an unhoused teenager she’s befriended, and her business partner, Frank, witness a murder where nothing quite adds up. Tom, her friend and married love interest, is a slightly dodgy police officer and gets assigned to the case. Sharing more details with her than he should, she finds herself pulled into a mystery with links to her own past.

Lestari is a fully fleshed and complicated character; cool and measured in a way that makes her an effective anchor in a wild and bending plot. I personally didn’t fully connect to her, but I think that’s because I had a hard time not morally judging her interest in a married father of two… these are all messy people who are dealing with a lot. I enjoyed how tattoos were used as a motif in the plot, as well as how the appeal of their permanence was important to the character.

All the characters in this book have instability in their lives, and this explains how they are able to so readily accept everything that happens. Lestari and Frank’s tattoo studios is routinely being robbed, their previous boss is very likely involved in organised crime, her mother is an alcoholic (a refugee with a law degree that never found work in New Zealand), her father had serious mental health issues and disappeared when she was 15, Jasper is unhoused, Tom self medicates on the job and never got over the murder of his friend etc etc this also makes them vulnerable to exploitation under the guise of offered help.

I am sure that the Auckland setting, which is incredibly specific down to names of streets, is significant but as a reader in the UK, that side of the novel is lost on me. I feel a bit sad about that, as I’ve read reviews by Kiwis who were able to make more of it!

This is an impressively well crafted and confident novel, especially as a debut. On reflection, I found it to be exceptionally well paced, and I never felt any friction. As I’ve said, there is a lot going on with Big Ideas, but it didn’t feel overwhelming because each new piece is slotted in when Lestari, and the reader, are ready to absorb it. The use of language is also highly evocative, and stays just shy of being “too flowery” for me.

I am going for a 3.75 rating (rounded up to 4 stars) because while I think it is a successful ambitious novel that characters and setting didn’t entirely resonate with me. I will look out for more from this author, but I’m not sure of this is a book that is going to stick with me personally.

Some of this may be because I read it in the audio format, which doesn’t give me the room to ruminate on the tricker metaphysical themes at play as I probably would have done if it’s read it in print. Also in all honesty I think I was dazzled and distracted by the narrator’s Kiwi accent! There is a surprisingly amount of dialogue where Lestari is saying “Yis” and it delighted me each time.

This book did remind me of A Users Guide to Make-Believe in its general character vibe and a fairly similar premise (technology ostensibility there to help people is built on a lot of exploitation and damages people’s lives). Isobar Precinct is definitely a more literary and well-crafted novel; I just found A User’s Guide (which I’d say is more like a Black Mirror episode) more accessible, however, that is possibly because it is set in the UK, and it was easier for me to relate to!

For Law of Fives, this gets me my second NZ author and a debut novel.