A local woman has recently published her fourth book and is already writing her fifth. 

Helen Herbert’s most recent book, Lost Property, which is available at Paper Plus Wānaka, is a mystery about a woman who returns from a work trip to find both her home and husband missing. 

“It follows the trials and tribulations faced by this woman as she tries to find out what happened,” Helen said. 

Helen wrote her first book at 13 - “not a very good one!” - but it wasn’t until her retirement to Wānaka in 2011 that she started writing fiction again.

Once she sits down at her computer the words come fairly easily.

“I start the book and then the characters start to almost write themselves,” she told the Wānaka App.

Helen’s latest novel, Lost Property, is available now at Paper Plus Wānaka.

Helen’s books are very character driven, she said, and in Lost Property the protagonist meets some unusual characters and she tries to find out what happened, each of whom have their own story and teach her something along the way. 

Lost Property is Helen’s first foray into the mystery genre.

She has also written A Year of Change (a story about the lives of a group of characters who live in the same Christchurch cul de sac), Executive Dilemma (a romance set between Wellington and Italy) and There and Beyond (which explores the lives of five young women on their adventure from post-war Britain to New Zealand). 

Each novel has taken Helen roughly a year to write but it can sometimes be difficult to find time for writing: “I find myself busy with all sorts of things.”

Helen says her books are light reads and women make up the majority of her readers.  

Her fifth book, currently underway, begins with a woman discovering a baby abandoned at a bus stop. The second chapter begins with the story of the person who left it there. 

“I love putting words together,” Helen says. “It’s always been something I did for myself.”

Hard copies of Lost Property are available at Paper Plus Wānaka and her other books are available online in e-book format here.

PHOTO: Supplied