Celebrate the launch of The Glasgow Smile (Original Sin Press) by Chris Stuart

New Zealand-based author, Chris Stuart, will be put through her paces by Coroner Audrey Jamieson.

Chris was the winner of the Ngaio Marsh Best First Novel Award, for her debut novel, For Reasons of Their Own, which was also shortlisted for the NZ Booklovers Fiction Award 2021. The book was long-listed for Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards. It also won the Elyne Mitchell Rural Writing Award.

In her second page-turning crime thriller, a woman is found murdered in a grimy graffiti-covered recess in one of Melbourne’s tangled inner city laneways. Why was the body found propped up in such an extraordinary position, almost as if she was intimate with the portrait on the wall? Was this death intended to be symbolic, or was the placement merely a device to deceive?

Set against a background of civil unrest and rising white extremism, a government tainted by corruption, and a family desperate to hide secrets, DI Robbie Gray, along with her Indigenous officer Mac, dig deep. 

This crime novel was inspired by a series of random events, including a stint Chris spent working as a nurse with Indigenous communities in the outback.

The Glasgow Smile is also a story of moral ambiguity, of camouflage, of how we see one image but it hides another, and how sometimes we need lies to hold ourselves together simply because the truth isn’t good enough.

Chris, a member of Sisters in Crime Australia, is an adventurer at heart and has led a restless and uncertain but exciting life, mostly in the Middle East, Indonesia, and the Pacific.

Coroner Audrey Jamieson was appointed a magistrate in 2004 and has worked as a full-time Coroner since 2005. Unusually, she started out her career as a nurse and later entered the legal profession after completing her degrees at Monash University. Audrey became a partner at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and an accredited specialist with the Law Institute of Victoria in personal injury litigation.

She regularly meets with the scientific members of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) to discuss matters germane to her investigations into reportable deaths. Audrey is the State Coroners’ Representative on the Ethics Committee at VIFM and a member of the Coroners’ Court of Victoria Research Advisory Committee. Audrey is also the Chair of the Coroners Education Committee and a member of the Judicial College of Victoria Judicial Conduct and Ethics Committee. She is a long-standing member of Sisters in Crime.

Free but please book.