Australian Author Meryl Brown Tobin Shares her Romantic Suspense
Meet Meryl Brown Tobin, an Australian native, and prolific writer. Her brand-new romantic suspense has just been published by Wild Rose Press.
Welcome Meryl…
Do your travels influence your writing?
Definitely and I often include mention of places I have visited. I am also a travel writer, and, apart from having scores of travel articles published, I have also written a travel book, Exploring Outback Australia. Apart from my memories of travelling with my husband and family, I have the book as a very useful tool to prompt me.
How did you choose the genre you write in?
I think the genre chose me as, in romantic suspense, I can include all the things that I know, observe, imagine and value, such as travel, environmental and humanitarian issues and respectful relationships between all peoples, sexes, religions and the like. For years, I have written short stories which are love stories with depth to them. I also enjoy watching detective stories, such as the first ‘Midsomer Murders’ with Tom Barnarby, ‘Inspector George Gently’, ‘Jack Frost’ and ‘Vera’.
Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?
I write about what I know––settings, people, relationships between people and real-life experiences, and stories give me ideas. Of course I play the What If…? game as well. For instance, the setting for ‘Broome Enigma’ came from several visits to the tropical, cosmopolitan town of Broome in Australia’s Outback. The germ for the storyline presented itself when we pulled up in an Outback caravan park and saw a handsome tanned young man dressed only in jeans and sandals and moving sprinklers around near our campervan site. Though he looked as if he had just stepped off a surfie movie set, his quiet, unsmiling demeanour did not fit. Over years of playing the ‘What Is …? game, I came up with the outline for a plot.
How did you come up with the title?
Fairly early on, the title popped into my head. It seemed perfect so I didn’t change it.
The hero, a complex person, is shrouded in mystery––so enigma suits him and his situation. From my imagination, I also constructed an underbelly in Broome society, so that makes another complex layer of mystery.
Are there certain characters you would like to go back to, or is there a theme or idea you’d love to work with?
A number of readers have told me how much they liked the characters and asked if I would be writing a sequel. Before that, I hadn’t given it a thought. However, I now have the start of a sequel and some other series I could develop milling around in my head. As I have other novels I have already written that need rewriting in the style favored by my publisher, I won’t be working on it for some time.
Broome Enigma
by Meryl Brown Tobin
On a working holiday in Australia’s cosmopolitan Outback town of Broome in 1986, Jodie, a young book designer and artist is open to romance and adventure.
At the holiday village where she is staying, she meets Joe, a young man who works there. Despite the strong attraction between them, the many unknowns about his earlier life keep them apart. To try to uncover his mysterious past, they travel to Perth and back to Broome and are drawn into not only bizarre but also dangerous situations.
Is Joe the person she thinks he is, or is he some alter ego? Can Jodie and Joe stop their relationship from developing until they have answers and know if he is free to love her?
The Buy Links
‘Broome Enigma’ is on sale on at least 33 websites in at least 16 countries including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, The Netherlands, Switzerland, UK and USA.
AMAZON US | AMAZON AUSTRALIA | B&N | GOOGLE BOOKS |
Learn more about Meryl Tobin
About Meryl Brown Tobin
Meryl Tobin, writing name Meryl Brown Tobin, is an Australian writer of short and long fiction for adults and children, non-fiction, especially on travel and the environment, poetry and educational puzzles. She has had 21 books published. These include puzzle/activity books, black-line masters books of educational puzzles, workbooks for primary students, a travel book, a children’s picture storybook, a poetry collection, and a haiku collection with four other poets of The Society of Women Writers Victoria. She has also edited one book and co-edited two others. In total, nearly 300,000 copies of her first four puzzle books, which were published by Ashton Scholastic, were sold in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Hundreds of her poems, puzzles, short stories, and travel and other articles, and some cartoons and comic strips have appeared in more than 150 magazines, newspapers and anthologies in Australia and overseas, including India, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the USA. Some of her stories and poems have been broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and other radio stations while others have been published on the Internet.
As a guest on the set of Ch 7’s children’s program The Book Place, she read her story LEFTY with regular presenter, Lynn Weston. For further details of Meryl Brown Tobin’s work, please see https://sites.google.com/view/merylbrowntobin-author.
Zara, thank you for your attractively-presented and informative feature on my debut novel, ‘Broome Enigma’. Much appreciated. Thank you too for your comment, Ilona. Meryl
Sounds like a great story!