Melissa Pouliot's detective returns with her latest crime novel

Missing people, the stark landscape of the Australian outback and the police system in the mid 90s combine for Ms Pouliot's next page-turning crime novel, Search for Sky.

The fourth instalment in the Rhiannon Series picks up the story of detective Rhiannon McVee who has made a name for herself with her new approach to investigating missing persons cases.

Search for Sky is Ms Pouliot's sixth crime novel after she took a break from writing when Kings Cross detectives found her cousin Ursula in 2017 following a 30-year search.

Prior to that Ms Pouliot released a book a year in an effort to keep public scrutiny on Ursula's disappearance in 1987 when they were teenagers.

"I'm thrilled to be back into my fiction writing after taking a break," she said.

"It has been a fairly intense few years for everyone that I know. For me, discovering what happened to Ursula and going through the coronial process, bushfires, COVID and moving house created the imperfect storm.

"Every time I tried to pick up this book which I started in 2017, the words wouldn't come. It's an age-old excuse for writers, but life definitely got in the way," Ms Pouliot said

"The story is set in 1995 and I loved being back in that time. I was a journalist in outback Queensland then, the way you navigated through things was so different; you had files in boxes," she said.

As with previous books in the series, there are clues and cliff hangers with the life threads of key characters continuing through this latest story.

"Crime fiction can be dark but they are real people with other lives. It's about keeping that reality going," Ms Pouliot said of her characters.