True crime author Vikki Petraitis turns to fiction with The Unbelieved

"It was a refreshing change to seek justice within the pages of fiction, because in real life, it's much harder to find," she says. "When you live in the world that I live in, where you are writing about these things all the time, to fictionalise it, there was this sense of hope, which sometimes isn't there in real life."

Her debut novel is The Unbelieved. Senior detective Antigone Pollard moves back home to a small coastal town after one of her cases in Melbourne has gone horribly wrong. Not long after, she's targeted by a would-be rapist at the local pub; there's been a run of sexual assaults in the district but not a lot is being done, by the police or the wider community. So Antigone takes matters into her own hands. She soon realises the town is full of secrets, the women are afraid and nobody believes them.

What's clever, and harrowing at the same time, is that Petraitis weaves a lot of fact through the fiction. Antigone's addressing a CWA meeting and tells the women about 80 per cent of sexual assault victims don't come forward and more than one woman a week is murdered by her partner or ex-partner. At the police station she's arguing with colleagues about how sexual assault victims are treated, or how they might identify abusive relationships, how women are treated more like the offender than the defendant in cases of he said/she said.

"Out of the 20 per cent of victims that come forward, only one in five gets to court," she said. "When you get to court there's about a four per cent chance he'll be found guilty. That goes for crimes against women and children. And then there's less than one per cent chance he'll go to jail.

"The police system and the courts are broken. It can be very terrifying, if you look at the women around you and think if this happened to you, your chances of getting justice are pretty much zero."

The message here is very clear, what Petraitis has excelled at is wrapping it all up in a fabulous, well-written story.

"A novel can shine a spotlight on something where long afterwards people might be thinking, that doesn't seem right," she says.

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In Antigone Pollard, Petraitis has found a character who's primed to tell that message. The inspiration for her came from an unlikely source.

"My dad loves Jack Reacher and I've read all of Lee Child's Reacher books, every time one would come out I'd buy one for dad and post one to his brother. We had this kind of ritual about Jack Reacher," she says.

"I wanted to create a female character, she's not Jack Reacher, she doesn't shoot people in the head and beat up eight guys outside the pub, but I wanted to capture his lack of fear, capture that kind of calculation that you need to move through that world, where she has to be two steps ahead of everyone else."

You'll be pleased to know Petraitis is already working on the second Antigone Pollard novel. The Unbelieved was the winner of the inaugural Allen and Unwin Crime Fiction Prize announced in April, 2022. She started writing it in 2017 as part of a PhD in creative writing.

Allen and Unwin publisher Jane Palfreyman, who's found many of Australia's best new writers, said the team read through 340 manuscripts for the prize.

"We could not have been more excited to find The Unbelieved," Palfreyman said in a statement. "Vikki has taken a lifetime of observing police work and true crime and brought this experience to writing fiction for the first time and the result is this fantastic novel: tightly paced, plausible, a fabulous read and, above all, completely gripping.

"It has everything I want in an unputdownable crime thriller, as well as tremendous emotional intelligence and the feeling that what is unfolding could be happening in any small town."

What Petraitis finds ironic is that she started writing the book in 2017, when the headlines revolved around Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and the #metoo movement. "When I submitted it they said it's really hit today's zeitgeist and I'm thinking, yeah, but I started it four years ago. There's just this undercurrent of ingrained misogyny that we can't seem to shake."

There's a scene in the book where a town meeting is called to address the run of assaults and their fallout. A man has died after inadvertently ingesting the drug the rapist is using. It's only after this event that the men start to pay attention.

"As mayor, I promise to find urgent solutions to this problem facing the men of Deception Bay ... it's come to the point where a man can't have a quiet beer without fearing for his life," a male character says.

Several women have already been assaulted but no one believes them.

"How often does that happen?" Petraitis says. "Men will ignore something that affects women and the minute it might affect them, they are on to it."

We talk for a while about other novels which address similar issues. She recommends Jane Caro's The Mother and Debra Oswald's The Family Doctor, where women have had enough of the system and decide to take things into their own hands.

"With those two novels, and mine, the women fight back, they says the system's not working so we're going to roll up our sleeves and do something about it. There's this narrative that constantly says no to women, where they're told they're just not quite good enough no matter how hard you try.

"The world is often viewed through this lens where women are always less."

Petraitis always wanted to be a writer. She was an avid reader, loved Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew books as a child, Agatha Christie as she got older. But when she thought about writing fiction she had no idea why someone would commit a crime.

"My upbringing was kind of sheltered," she says.

"So I started reading true crime and once you do, you just get completely hooked. These are things that really happened and that's the power of it.

"What I love about true crime as a writer is that true crime is really about resilience and human nature.

"It's about people stepping up after something terrible happens and there's a huge amount of humanity in response to true crime.

"I think that's what I wanted to explore in this novel too ... we naturally assume that all victims or families of victims are just shattered and broken but so many of them really rise up and want to change things."