Sarah Thornton left her a successful legal career as a corporate lawyer at the top of her game, after winning Australian Corporate Lawyer of the Year in 2016. She bought a Catamaran with her husband and left Brisbane for a life on the sea, where she finished writing Lapse and started work on the sequel.

Sarah is an active member of the Brisbane arts community and is on the board of the Queensland Writers’ Centre, which is why she wanted to launch her book in Brisbane.

All it took was a lapse…a momentary lapse…to bring Clementine Jones’ world crashing down. Now she is living like a hermit in small-town Katinga, coaching the local footy club. She is supposed to be lying low, but here she is, with her team on the cusp of their first premiership in fifty years – and the whole bloody town counting on her, cheering her on. So why the hell would her star player quit on the eve of the finals? It is a question she wishes she had left alone. Others are starting to ask questions too – questions about her. Clem’s not the only one with a secret, and as tension builds, the dark violence just below the town’s surface threatens to erupt. Pretty soon there’ll be nowhere left for Clem to hide.

Praise for Thornton’s Lapse series has been positive. Emma Viskic, author of Resurrect Bay described it as a, “a quintessentially Australian story of small-town conspiracies, dark secrets and footy finals.” Crime fiction writer Candice Fox, “Clementine Jones is a heroine for our times: fierce, feisty and fallible.” Michael Collins praised it as “a true page-turner and a surefire hit.”

Readers also enjoyed our story about Melissa Lucashenko, the winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin literary award.