Broome Enigma follows an artist as she falls for an amnesiac man and uncovers a dangerous mystery involving corrupt police, drug smugglers, and attempted murder. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

My husband Hartley and I have travelled extensively throughout the Australian Outback and love Broome, a cosmopolitan coastal town in Western Australia, the setting of my novel. On one of our trips, a handsome, suntanned, but unsmiling young man dressed only in jeans and sandals was the maintenance man in one of the Outback caravan parks at which we stayed. Because he didn’t ‘fit’ and I wanted to make him fit, I played the ‘What If?’ game until I came up with a plausible reason for him working in the park. Once I came up with him as my hero, Joe, and my setting, Broome, a heroine, a title, and the outline of a plot soon followed.

Why was it important to make Jodie warm, capable, and direct?

I like to make each character different from another and interweave them to make an engaging story. At first, Jodie was a foil for her somewhat irresponsible younger sister, Tiffany, but, more importantly, as the story progressed, she needed such qualities or needed to develop them to help a confused young man find his identity and get back his purpose in life.

How did you decide where to place the romantic turning points?

Once I got the characters established in their setting, they virtually took over with just a push every now and again from me if things were happening too slowly or too quickly. Sometimes I couldn’t wait to get to my computer to see where they were going to take me.

Are there particular themes or questions you hope readers discuss after finishing?

1. As your perceptive reviewer pointed out, the main characters’ ‘repeated debate over whether Joe and Marc are the same person’ turns the amnesia romance into a story about identity as well as attraction. Critic Karen Bartell asks: What role does identity play in relationships? How important are shared experiences and memories? How does each person’s set of values attract or influence the other?
2. Did the author succeed in entwining ‘romance, mystery, and the Broome setting’? If so,
   how?
3. What made each of the characters memorable and believable?
4. How could the characters continue in a sequel? (I already have a number of ideas myself.)

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