Candice Fox

All right, Debbie, what about you? What are you loving?

I'm just loving life generally, can I say? something I have to say I love many nights we have a little fire my husband and I we live on small acreage on an acre and a half and we've got out the back a little just a fire pit with better blocks around it and we sit around the fire and he's a builder he's a carpenter so we always have scrap wood to burn and we have a little fire and and I have a wine and it's like one of my favorite little things to do and when I go to bed at night I like reading a novel and Chris Hammer and Candice Fox two Australian authors crime mystery type authors that I have been enjoying lately so it's those I went for you know those are quite different turn off from the school, which is school and music education, which is all consuming.

Have to check out that author.

Thank you.

And that includes the sub-genre rural noir, a term coined to describe crime or mystery novels with rural settings that are integral to the story and which fundamentally contribute to the tension surrounding the central question.

We only have to think about books written by trailblazer Jane Harper like The Dry and The Lost Man, also Chris Hammer with Scrublands, Hayley Scribner and Dirt Town, Danuka McKenzie with The Torrent, Margaret Hickey, Candice Fox, Gary Disher, just to name some to understand the sensation that is this genre.

And today listeners I'm going to introduce you all to another novelist who debuted in this genre last month.

Award-winning journalist, former television presenter and author Whitney Fitzsimmons who is best known for her work at the ABC, Her debut novel, The Rising, published by Ventura Press, is set in a small northern New South Wales town plagued by floods.

I do think there is this idea of comparison, um, because we hear about writers all the time who s- and, you know, we see writers that seem to be pocking, putting out a book a year.

And yet, as I spend more time in the industry, I sort of think there are some people that are very good at coming up with the conception of a story quickly, and there will just always be people, someone like Candice Fox, who seems to just be able to really get to the heart of a character quite quickly and sort of execute a story that you go, you know, she's got that screenwriter's ability, really.

I think her-

Yeah