I was absolutely thrilled to share the 2006 Sisters in Crime Davitt Readers' Choice Award with the legendary Kerry Greenwood for her Corinna Chapman novel Heavenly Pleasures. It was a gala event at the Melbourne Irish club, more stars than there are in the sky, more champagne than I possibly should have ingested...I love you guys!

How do you control or contain a character through a series of several crime novels?

Best-selling authors Leigh Redhead and Tara Moss talk with media personality Ella James about the joys and hardships of getting to know their feisty characters Simone Kirsch and Makkede (Mak) Vanderwall.

Now in it's sixth year the Popular Australian Readers' & Writers' Festival, invite you to really enjoy yourselves with a great program of exciting and entertaining panel discussions - always with lots of Q & A and, as ever, absolutely free!

It's 10 years since the Herald began naming the best young Australian novelists. Fresh and ambitious, this year's winners tackle the big issues: love, sex, murder and footy.

This year's judges (crime novelist Kerry Greenwood, Herald literary editor Catherine Keenan, and I) read a dozen novels. The majority fitted into the dominant commercial genres: crime, thriller, chick lit.

Sharing the award with Stephanie Bishop, Tony Wilson and Markkus Zusak this is what the judges had to say about Leigh's work:

Redhead masters and cleverly twists the conventions of the old mean streets and female PI novels. She creates scenes and characters with an eye for detail and humour. Rubdown is a well-structured, pacey story about Simone's investigation into a masseuse's murder and her own busy sex life.

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