Chris Roberts is a New Zealand author with a lifetime of reading passion behind him. Now retired from business, he lives in Cambridge, Waikato, with his wife Jennifer — his first reader, sharpest editor, and partner of over 44 years.
Before he turned to fiction full-time, Chris built a career in business. That long view of how organisations, money, and power actually move gave him the perfect lens for the thrillers he writes now: stories where large-scale disaster meets ordinary people forced to make impossible choices.
His work draws deeply on real experience. In 1978, a much younger Chris landed in Coober Pedy, South Australia, to try his luck at opal mining. He didn't strike it rich, but he came home with a suitcase of red dust, a lasting fascination with the Australian outback, and the raw material that would eventually shape his third novel — a Pilbara-set story about a three-million-year-old discovery and everything it threatens to rewrite.
Chris writes about the things that interest him: climate risk, environmental collapse, corporate ambition, and the human stories that surface when systems fail. His novels move between frozen oceans, polluted coastlines, and ancient landscapes, always asking what one person can do when the world around them starts to slip.
His debut, Deadly Ice, follows a father's desperate need to save his dying daughter by towing a colossal Antarctic iceberg to a drought-stricken Australia — a plan that becomes a race against an apocalyptic oil slick when a solar-flare-induced earthquake triggers a tsunami. The sequel, Toxic Legacy, traces the environmental reckoning that follows. And Starfall Legacy will bring together Aboriginal lore, rare-earth mining, and a secret older than humanity itself.
"Every book I write is dedicated to Jennifer, who has believed in these stories longer than anyone else — and who has made sure I actually finished them."
When he isn't writing, Chris enjoys gardening, reading and researching for future novels