Jen: What inspired you to write In The Deep? Loreth: Thanks for hosting me, Jen. In The Deep was inspired by a visit to my brother who lives in a small oceanside town in New South Wales, Australia. He’s a big wave surfer, and a man of the sea in every way, so of course we went out deep sea fishing in his tiny boat. When we were ten miles off the coast, heaving about on the white-veined swells of the deep blue waters of the Tasman Sea, with the Australian coastline just a distant purple haze, I got to thinking: Anything could happen out here, and there would be no one to witness it, and what if someone did go overboard, and maybe not by mistake. Later, while eating dinner outside under a vermillion sky, and listening to the flying foxes squabble overhead and the lorikeets and ‘cockies’ fighting in the gum trees, my brother regaled us with tales of some of his adventures, like the time he got a treble hook stuck in his neck. And he told us how the flying foxes–giant bats–can swarm in groups along the highway as they migrate, and more . . ….

I absolutely love mysteries and thrillers—books, movies, TV shows—I binge them all. I am also inspired by them. In fact, my newest novel, In The Dark, is an homage to author Agatha Christie and one of her most iconic stories And Then There Were None. In my novel, Christie’s story actually becomes a plot device, a psychological tool, that the villain uses to instill fear in the victims that are trapped. The victims know what transpired in And Then There Were None, which has them anticipating that the same will happen to them. Some of my other favorite mystery writers include Daphne DuMaurier and Patricia Highsmith. Also, at the moment I’m loving Lisa Jewell’s voice and her domestic suspense—I’ve been on a Lisa Jewell glom. In this vein, I love Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard and enjoyed Helen Fitzgerald’s The Cry, and Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen’s The Wife Between Us. Liane Moriarty, too. Off the top of my head, my favorite thriller movies include The Bone Collector, The Thomas Crowne Affair (for the romantic tension), and The Debt (pure tension plus love triangle!) And finally, let’s not forget great TV shows in this genre. I think that the television series adaptation of The Cry is just fabulous. I am hooked on Big Little Lies. I’m also a…

My newest book, THE DARK BONES, is about a cop who learns that her father—a retired police officer—has killed himself. My heroine, Detective Rebecca North, cannot believe it. But in order to prove it Rebecca must return to her small and rural home town where she will be forced to face a lot of dark things she’s been running from, including Ash Haugen, the man she left behind long ago, and a cold case everyone thought long buried. At the heart, THE DARK BONES is about second chances, about being forced to revisit mistakes from the past, and then digging deep in an effort to set things right, and heal. It’s about the cold case wounds I suspect we all have buried in our subconscious somewhere, in one way or another, those unhappy events that have helped shape everything we do, and everything we have become. In Rebecca and Ash’s case, it’s also about being able to love again once they’ve addressed the reasons underpinning their old mistakes and lies. I’m a plotter for the most part. I go into a new story knowing who my protagonists are. I know what their big ‘wounds’ are, and I know what they…

In THE DROWNED GIRLS, Detective Angie Pallorino took down a serial killer permanently and, according to her superiors, with excessive force. Now, in THE LULLABY GIRL, Angie is forced back into uniform and she’s been benched on a desk assignment for 12 months. This challenges Angie in every way—if she’s not a detective, who is she? Then a decades-old cold case washes ashore, and Angie is pulled into an investigation she recognizes as deeply, frighteningly, personal. Driven and desperate to solve her case in spite of her probation, Angie goes rogue, risking her relationship with Detective Maddocks, her career, and her very life in pursuit of the answers to her past. But she’ll learn that some truths might be too painful to bear, and some sacrifices include collateral damage. And she’ll have to make some hard choices. Thankfully, unlike Angie, I am not a work-a-holic. Angie has no pets, no plants. No time nor care goes into maintaing her apartment. Because solving cases is her life. Me? I have pets, and a marriage, and children, and an elderly parent … a life. However, a writer does need a certain kind of obstinance to be able to seat oneself in front…