Academic and Canberra author Dr Alison Booth’s latest book is her first foray into crime fiction.   

With seven historical and contemporary fiction books, Dr Booth (nom de plume AL Booth) is no stranger to the publishing industry. 

A historian and researcher at heart, her latest book follows Jack O’Rourke in 1915 Australia, a young man two days away from deploying in the army for The Great War. 

While striding around Sydney Harbour, he sees an old man pushed by a group of youths into the water. Jack dives in, rescuing the stranger and putting him into a nearby hotel, using what little money he had on him. 

Four years later, Jack returns from war, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and wounded, with a deed to Samuel Lomond’s estate, the stranger he’d rescued from drowning, who had ultimately been murdered. 

Arriving at the Booroomba property outside Eden in the fictional town of Warrawolong, NSW, Jack is greeted frostily as the local community assumes Lomond’s murderer was the unknown stranger taking his property. 

Fighting to clear his name and find the killer, Jack discovers a decade-long conspiracy. 

Inspired by a childhood memory, Death at Booroomba was crafted after Alison went to show her husband a small country house belonging to a family friend. 

Finding it demolished, she says her mind furiously began to connect the small war memorials she’d seen in country towns to the country house…  and a story began. 

She says Jack and Sam’s story almost wrote itself. 

“I love [reading] murder mysteries, but it was my husband’s idea to write one,” says Alison. 

Describing the writing process as a “learning experience”, Alison says she didn’t know who the killer was until the very end. 

“I had different inclinations as to who did it, but it was only in the redrafts that it was finalised.”

An emeritus professor of economics, Alison’s career has been deeply rooted in the economy. She says economics and writing aren’t that different. 

“I used to think that there was absolutely no connection,” she says. 

“But now I think there is a connection, because economics is all about individuals and how their behaviour affects aggregates, and how it can result in things.

“Fiction literature is about individuals, and how their motivations affect emotions.”

Death at Booromba is available in bookstores or at venturapress.com.au