About

Born in Tasmania… Sarah has always loved words, confessing to reading dictionaries as a child and listening to parliament on the radio as a teenager. After completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Diploma of Education in the 80s, Sarah survived four months of a banking graduate traineeship in the big smoke (Sydney) before a restless energy drove her to the thrill and rush of sales. Unable to stick at anything longer than two years, she spread herself thin across a number of industries from medical to robotics. Little wonder she sought out something more substantial, completing a law degree in her early thirties. Twenty years as a lawyer followed, the pinnacle being honoured as Australia’s Corporate Lawyer of the Year in 2016.

Sarah describes the practice of law as the use of words to disentangle society’s most difficult knots and it was during these decades that her desire to write grew. Married to an experienced ocean sailor, Dean, she came up with the notion of living on a boat and writing novels. Dean put a plan into action (quickly, before she changed her mind) and they’ve been living onboard their 43 foot catamaran, Live Louder (yes, it’s named after the song), ever since, sailing from the tropics of the Great Barrier Reef to the majestic beauty of Tasmania.
Sarah’s first novel, Lapse, was completed before moving aboard and published in August 2019. The manuscript for her second novel, White Throat (published December 2020), began within days of moving aboard and is set in the Great Sandy Straits, the first extended stop on their Live Louder adventure. Both are crime thrillers featuring fierce and feisty heroine, Clementine Jones, a fallen lawyer trying to escape her catastrophic past. Described as ‘addictive’, ‘riveting’, ‘compelling’, ‘relentlessly intense’ Sarah’s books have been praised as beautifully evocative of Australia in both landscape and dialogue.