The Search for Anne Perry: The Hidden Life of a Bestselling Crime Writer

A New York Times Best Seller!

In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the movie Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. The movie launched Jackson’s international career. It also forever changed the life of Anne Perry, an award-winning, bestselling crime writer, who at the time of the movie’s release was publicly outed at Juliet Hulme, one of the murderers. A new light was now cast, not only on Anne’s life but also on her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths and confront dark issues, including infanticide and incest.

Acclaimed literary biographer Joanne Drayton was given unparalleled access to Anne Perry, her friends, relatives, colleagues, and archives to complete this book. She intersperses the story of her life with an examination of her writing, drawing parallels between Perry’s own experiences and her characters and storylines. Anne Perry’s books deal with miscarriages of justice, family secrets exposed, punishment, redemption, and forgiveness, themes made all the more poignant in light of her past. She has sold 25 million books worldwide and published in 15 different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories. The Search for Anne Perry is a gripping account of a life, and provides understanding of the girl Anne was, the adult she became, her compulsion to write, and her view of the world.

Joanne Drayton in the author of the critically acclaimed Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime and three other biographies. She is associate professor in the Department of Design at the Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. She lives in Auckland.