NEW DATE: Sisters in Crime in the Library: Bodies on the beach

Authors Emma Viskic and Aoife Clifford will be in conversation with fellow writer, Leigh Redhead, about the dead bodies which keep inconveniently washing up on beaches but are great plot devices. 

In Emma Viskic’s Those Who Perish (Echo Publishing, March 2022), her series finale, the deaf PI Caleb Zelic is meeting up with his drug-using brother Ant just before dawn on the beach at Resurrection Bay. A sniper starts shooting and soon there’s a body on the beach but it isn’t Ant’s. Caleb tracks Ant down to a small, nearby wind-punished island, where secrets run deep and resentments deeper. Then a sniper starts terrorising the isolated community …

Emma Viskic’s internationally acclaimed Caleb Zelic books have won numerous prizes, including a Ned Kelly Award, and an unprecedented five Davitt Awards. Her debut novel, Resurrection Bay, was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Gold Dagger and New Blood Dagger. It was recently voted one of the decade’s best crime novels by Crime Time UK. Other novels include And Fire Came Down and Darkness for Light.

Before becoming an author, Emma was a classical clarinettist. Her musical career ranged from performing with José Carreras and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, to busking for beer money in St Kilda.

In Aoife Clifford’s third novel, When We Fall (Ultimo Press, March 2022), failing barrister Alex Tillerson returns to her hometown to look after her mother who is starting to suffer from dementia. Walking on Beacon Beach, the two discover a severed leg that turns out to belong to a woman later found drowned off the coast. When the police take a cavalier attitude to solving the crime, Alex feels obliged to do her own investigating, a task that becomes more compelling as it might be related to the earlier murder of a teenage environmental campaigner…

Aoife Clifford is the author of best-selling literary crime novels, Second Sight, runners-up in 2019 for Crime Book of the Year in the Davitt Awards, and All These Perfect Strangers, which was long-listed for both the ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and the Voss Literary Prize. She is an S.D. Harvey award winner and has won the Scarlet Stiletto first prize in 2007 and subsequently six category awards. Aoife been shortlisted for the UK Crime Association’s Debut Dagger, amongst other prizes. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Australia, the UK, and the US.

Leigh Redhead’s first Simone Kirsch crime novel, Peepshow (Allen & Unwin, 2007 starts with a body washed up on St Kilda beach. It’s a strip club owner and Simone Kirsch (aka Vivien Leigh), stripper and PI, is determined to find the real killer…

Leigh’s three books in the series: Rubdown, Cherry Pie, and Thrill City, draw on her own experience as a stripper and are all set in St Kilda and Balaclava. Leigh now has a PhD in Creative Writing on Australian noir fiction from the University of Wollongong. Her PhD noir novel, Cleave for Me, is in search of a publisher.