FAQ

Overkill was really my first big story. (I'm not counting the ones I wrote at school)

No way! I'm far more polite and well brought up than she is. She is her own person. My Mum say's she can see aspects of me in Sam. If there's any trait I've given Sam it is her optimism and her love of cryptic crosswords.

One has to be very selective with the truth. If I portrayed detective work the way it is in reality, it would bore readers witless. So I try to stay true the reader's expectation of fictional reality.

The most fun and the most intense would be starring on The Traitors New Zealand. How often in life do you get the opportunity to live inside a game?!!! And I got to work with an amazing bunch of people. It was fabulous.

Read, read, read. And read widely, not just within the genre you want to write in. With your writing, keep polishing it and persisting.

They weren’t at all concerned about the fact I was killing people off!

It is born completely out of paranoia about the dreadful things that could possibly happen to me or my family. The prologue to Overkill was the result of sleep deprived, vaguely hysterical paranoia.

I have plenty of crime writers who I enjoy and admire, but the only one who I'd pop up there as a hero would have to be our home grown local girl, Ngaio Marsh, who took the world by storm and was one of the four Queens of Crime Fiction (Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Margerie Allingham and Dorothy Sayers) in the golden age of crime fiction. Unfortunately she seems to have fallen out of our collective consciousness now, but I'm trying to do something about that.

Who says I'm nice?! Writing crime fiction came down to a pragmatic choice. I was advised to write what I love to read. I loved to read crime fiction and historic fiction, but at the time I had young babies, so couldn't do the research required to do historic fiction justice in libraries and museums (which are a little twitchy about squidgy, unpredictable things that might poo and spew in the vicinity of their collections). Researching for crime fiction was far more accessible. Crime is everywhere!

The thing that is complained about the most is the swearing! Yes, I know. No one complains about the fact someone, or several someones have been murdered in a nasty fashion, no, they complain about a tiny bit of swearing. I also got told off about the elephant in The Ringmaster.

Wine: Central Otago reds

Food: Home made pizza with a glass of a Central Otago red.

Movie: Anything involving Predator or Alien or Terminator - yes I’m that classy

Music: Enjoying revisiting the music of my teenage years in the ‘80’s

Book: Outlander (Cross Stitch) by Diana Gabaldon.

Sometimes I cry and then drink Central Otago red wine, and the other time I just drink the wine.

I most certainly do – it gets me out of the house. If you require any of those things, see my contact page on this website.

All of them! I would be curious to see who the director would cast in the rolls – I don't have any preferences, other than ensuring the actress who plays Sam Shephard is short – she is just over five foot tall. I'd be mortified if they cast some tall actress as it would immediately destroy one of the main obstacles Sam has to overcome in life, and part of who she is.

No, otherwise I'd never have time to write my novels. Also there are plenty of Manuscript Assessors out there who are very, very good at giving you an honest and constructive opinion on your work. Better to leave it to the experts!

Straight into my computer. I carry notebooks around for emergency jottings, but the majority of it is straight onto the screen. Quite a few bits get scrawled onto the newspaper page with the cryptic crossword and Sudoku on my bedside table, in the dark from when inspiration strikes in the middle of the night. They're often very hard to decipher in the morning.

My goal is to write a thousand words per day. But real life, a day job and mood swings come into play, so some days I might write two thousand, and other days I might struggle to string one sentence together! Ultimately I treat writing as my career, so I have to sit my butt down in the chair and get going.

Even sporting my best tiara and waving my most powerful wand I don't think I could change the attitudes of some people towards crime and genre fiction. There seems to be this obsession with 'literature' being the only true writing; I don't know why. Ultimately it's the readers who count though. There's some great crime writing coming out of New Zealand and there are many people who love to read it, so we shall conquer the hearts of the nation, one reader at a time.