A Killer Among Friends follows a journalist as she investigates a friend’s murder, only to uncover dark secrets and a connection to a past tragedy—forcing her to question everyone she trusts. What inspired you to explore the theme of hidden dangers within close friendships?

I didn’t begin with this theme in mind; it developed as I wrote. The story was always going to be personal for Jade because the victim was one of her close friends who moved in the same circles. Murder is usually committed by someone known to the victim, so by default, Jade knew all the suspects.

To further interweave the main players’ personal and professional lives, I had them work together in a startup IT company—all except Jade, which made her feel excluded. As she uncovered dark secrets about her friends, her sense of isolation and disorientation escalated and through her experience, I started asking: What if someone you knew was a criminal? How would it make you feel about your judgement of human nature? How would it impact your ability to trust others?

How did you approach balancing multiple perspectives while maintaining suspense?

My first draft only had Jade’s perspective in the present day. I set it aside for some time to work on other projects, then came back to it and did a major rewrite. I wanted to show Jade’s best friend Elena when she was alive, so readers could witness what happened in scene rather than hearing a character relay it to Jade in dialogue, and considered several possible points of view.

Eventually, I chose Danny because he was privy to information Jade didn’t have, and he adored Elena and would present her in a biased and glowing light. Jade and Danny each have past and present sections.

Once I had Danny’s chapters on the page, I made color-coded index cards of every scene in the novel and placed them on a table in order. I highlighted each key reveal, and moved the cards around to figure out when these pivotal moments would have the greatest impact. It was a huge mind puzzle.

Did any real-life events or cases influence the mystery in A Killer Among Friends?

In book one, The Godfather of Dance, I wrote about a family involved in money laundering, but I really didn’t know a lot about financial crimes, so I did more research.

Among other things, I found The Sure Thing, a fabulous podcast series by Angus Griggs of the Australian Financial Review, about Australia’s biggest insider trading scam by Christopher Hill and Lukas Kamay. The simplicity of it, the audacity is mind-blowing. These cases are extremely difficult to prove, and if they hadn’t got greedy, they would have got away with it.

I wanted my characters to have a similar fearlessness, a youthful assumption that they’d get away with their crimes.

Without spoilers, can you hint at what’s next for Jade Riley in future installments?

Book three, The Man in the Dam, is out in December.

Murder. Theater. Community secrets.

Journalist Jade Riley hosts a dinner party at her parents’ idyllic property in Mansfield, an area alive with the rustles and chirps of the Australian bush. She invites members of the local amateur theater society: a photographer, a lawyer, a fire investigator, a teacher, a bookshop owner, and a farmer. It may sound like the opening to a joke, but when Jade wakes the next morning to find one of her guests dead in a dam, the punchline falls flat.

As Jade investigates, she soon discovers each guest is playing a role—some parts with lethal consequences.

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