Sue Williams Books in Order

Sue Williams was raised in country Victoria, and that background runs straight through her fiction. Her crime novels are set in Rusty Bore, a tiny Mallee town with just 147 residents, where everybody notices a stranger and nobody forgets a mistake. The place is funny, dusty, a little worn down, and very specific, which is a big reason the books feel lived in rather than made up.

Before she published fiction, Williams took a route that was anything but standard. She worked as a science and travel writer, qualified as a chartered accountant, and completed a PhD in marine biology at the University of Western Australia. She has also written for magazines and for ABC Radio National's The Science Show.

It is not the usual road into murder mysteries.

Her first published writing was academic. Williams has said it was a scientific paper about the feeding ecology of sea slugs, which tells you something useful about both her range and her sense of humour. Even in her crime novels, there is often a practical, observant mind beneath the jokes, paying close attention to how people behave and what they are trying not to say.

The shift into fiction came later, and one moment seems to have mattered a lot. Williams has spoken about the phone call asking her to come in and discuss her manuscript, the book that became Murder With the Lot. Published in 2013, it introduced Cass Tuplin, takeaway owner, mother, and unofficial investigator, and it was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction.

Then Cass stayed.

Williams brought her back in Dead Men Don't Order Flake, followed by Live and Let Fry and Death at the Belvedere. Across those novels, readers get a mix of mystery, family friction, gossip, and the daily business of keeping a small town and a small takeaway running. The cases get bigger, but the books never lose sight of everyday life. Live and Let Fry was later shortlisted for both the Ned Kelly and Davitt awards, which showed the series had real staying power.

What readers tend to like about these books is easy to spot. Cass is funny, nosy, impulsive, and often wrong before she is right, but she keeps going. The supporting cast matters just as much, especially her policeman son Dean, the rest of her family, and the neighbours and old friends who make Rusty Bore feel crowded even when it is nearly empty.

Williams has said she loves funny books, and that helps explain the tone. Her novels make room for comedy in rural crime without treating country life like a joke. The humour comes from voice, timing, awkward family moments, bruised pride, old resentments, and the simple fact that small communities give everybody far too many chances to interfere in one another's business.

Place matters in her work, too. Williams writes the Mallee as more than scenery. In these books it is a landscape of dust, distance, long memory, and communities that have learned how to get by with less. That gives the stories their recurring themes: loyalty, loneliness, stubbornness, local history, and the way secrets behave in towns that are too small to hold them comfortably.

These days Williams lives in Melbourne with her husband. Even from the city, her fiction keeps circling back to country Victoria, to fish and chip paper, back roads, and people who know far too much about one another. It turns out that is very good territory for comedy, crime, and one memorable amateur sleuth.