Australian Crime Fiction Database

As well as being a full-time author, Kirsty is the director of Driftwood Manuscripts, an assessment and editing agency for writers. She has a Journalism Degree, an Advanced Diploma in Professional Writing and is Chair of the SA Writers' Centre. She has had two books shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award, Lady Luck in 2003 for Best First Crime Fiction Novel and The Vodka Dialogue in 2004 for Best Crime Fiction Novel.

The Happiness Punch (2004)

The Lady Splash (2006)

The Phoebe Banks series

From the Dustjacket

Lady Luck : Meet Phoebe "the sexiest, luckiest lady in crime"
Freshly dumped, like an old Pepsi can on the side of the road, by a boy with bad hair riding a Ducati. So she isn't exactly jazzed to discover her ex-boyfriend was also a drug-dealer, and she's accidentally ended up with his merchandise.

Phoebe figures she might as well take advantage of her situation, as young people are encouraged to do in the free-market economy, and it's about then that Jackson Sinclair, the impossibly sexy policeman, starts asking some difficult questions and Phoebe has to figure out if she wants him to kiss her or arrest her.

Lady Luck is a mystery adventure in the tradition of Janet Evanovich and Helen Fielding. It races along on a sassy ride of love, disaster and junk food as Phoebe tries to get her life back together, dodge some of her dubious new acquaintances, and maybe get laid.

The Vodka Dialogue : Cassidy Blair, twenty-nine years old and addicted to pot noodles, is making little progress convincing customers at DVDWorld that John Hughes movies are better than recreational drugs. But when she helps a colleague spy on a wayward fiance, and gets paid rather well for her trouble, Cass realises she has the perfect credentials for any P.I. And she's tense, cynical and slightly grouchy. Plus she owes the VISA company a lot of cash.

Assisted by the handy skills of her friends and her favourite cocktail, the Vodka Dialogue, Cass manages to follow the trail and escape from more embarrassing incidents than she's ever known in her life. All this from a girl who's been drunk on Wheel of Fortune!

The Happiness Punch : When Cassidy Blair takes on her third job as amateur sleuth, she never expects to end up in the back of a shaggin' wagon with a has-been pop star called Jason Wilde, but Cass was never the best judge of character, or career for that matter.

Still recovering from the black eye and five kilos she gained on her last job, she just wants to eat some low fat yogurt, take it easy and forget the whole kissing incident with Officer Sam Tasker.

Well, maybe not necessarily forget, but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth and Cassidy's getting twitchy. And now that she's a little bit in love and a whole lot broke, she's ill-prepared for the mysterious Ned Maxwell.

The Millionaire Float : In kindergarten Cassidy Blair was a biter, in primary-school, she was a scrapper and in high-school, she liked to think she was a dark horse. In fact, she was a silent loner, and not in a cool way.

So when her old nemesis, the blonde, now recklessly alcoholic, bully Amantha Bluett, returns to town with some superior firepower and resentment bigger than her make-up collection, Cassidy struggles to keep her temper, and her relationship, intact.

Fortunately, despite her best efforts, she's collected a few friends along the way who manage to get her in and out of trouble faster than she can change underwear. So by the time her boyfriend Sam confesses to his own history with Amantha, Cass has perfected more than just the ideal revenge scenario, she's also got a job exposing one of the city's biggest players while wearing the tightest corset this side of Tara.

Luckily, Cassidy Blair is not someone who'd let a little breathlessness come between her and the sex, especially with someone like the annoyingly gorgeous Sam Tasker...

The Vodka Dialogue (2003)	The Millionaire Float (2005)
The Happiness Punch (2004)	The Lady Splash (2006)