Desperate times, desperate measures

Homelessness, financial crises, bad decisions, and family secrets can make for desperate times requiring desperate measures – even murder. Authors Michelle Prak, Samantha Byres, and Anna Snoekstra will chew over the issues with fellow author, Ilsa Evans.

From Michelle Prak, the bestselling Adelaide author of The Rush, comes a spine-chilling thriller – Barren Cape (Simon & Schuster) – about what happens when people are pushed to the edge by homelessness and forced to make unthinkable choices. An abandoned resort seems the perfect place to hide, but is Barren Cape a refuge or a trap?

Michelle is a professional communicator with a thirty-year career in PR, social media, politics, and journalism. Her short stories have been shortlisted in several competitions, and she was runner-up in the Furphy Literary Award 2021. The Rush was longlisted for Best Debut Crime Novel in the 2024 Davitt Awards. She teaches communication subjects at the University of South Australia.

From Samantha Byres comes Dead Ends (UQP), her debut sexy, blackly comic mystery, where the impossibility of closure and a desire to fix the past collide. All-round chaos merchant Nell Jenkins has returned to Aotearoa/New Zealand to care for her ailing mother. She is reeling from the end of a relationship that is now being combed over by HR. A once-famous TV psychic, Petronella Bush, insinuates herself into Nell’s life, promising the family closure on the haunting deaths of two girls. Driven by her lust for Katya, an empty bank account and the need to come to terms with these two life-defining deaths, Nell is drawn deeper into Petronella’s charismatic web . . .

Samantha is a writer from Whanganui, Aotearoa, now living in Naarm/Melbourne. She attended the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, and her work appears in Turbine, JAAM, Sport, and Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa.

And from Melbourne author Anna Snoekstra is The Ones We Love (Ultimo Press), a novel about the Jansens, an Aussie family living in Los Angeles who resort to desperate measures to cover up a crime. Since the weekend of the party – the one 22-year-old Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises – she’s been padlocked out of her bedroom. What is the secret that needs to be hidden?

Anna is the author of Only Daughter, Little Secrets, The Spite Game, and Out of Breath. Her novels have been published in more than twenty countries and sixteen languages. She has written for many publications including The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Crime Reads, and is a profile writer for The Saturday Paper. In 2023, she released her first audio drama, This Isn’t Happening.

Host, Melbourne author Ilsa Evans, has published sixteen books that range from memoir and light fiction to more serious subject matters such as euthanasia and family break-ups. Two of her books have been shortlisted for the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards, while her novel, Broken, largely based on the findings of a PhD on domestic violence, was an Australian bestseller. The Unusual Abduction of Avery Conifer has been optioned for a television series. Her latest book, Family Baggage, was published by Harper Collins in 2023. Ilsa also works in academia, writes social commentary, and has been published in several newspapers and online journals.

Men or ‘brothers-in-law’ welcome.

Sun Bookshop stall: Sisters in Crime members receive a 10% discount