Cemetery Lake immediately hit the NZ Bestsellers List on its release in 2008. On its release in Germany in 2009, it climbed to the #2 spot on Amazon.de, falling in behind Dan Brown’s latest book, selling over 50,000 copies within its first month. It made the NZ Listener Best Books of 2008, ranked up there against the top national and international titles of the year. The book follows Theodore Tate, a private investigator who stumbles upon three corpses who bubble up to the surface of a small lake inside the grounds of a cemetery, while an exhumation is taking place.