“The idea of taking on the formidable task of writing a novel was conceived aboard a glorious dahabiya on the river Nile in Egypt, where the Victoria West series was born.”
ABOUT VICKI
Born in New Zealand, Vicki always dreamed about travelling the world and writing about her adventures. If she wasn’t poring over her world map on her parents’ living room floor, then you can bet she’d be tucked up in bed devouring Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins and Agatha Christie classics.
Although never setting out to be a writer - she did win first place (and an ice-cream sundae) for a children’s story she penned for Jabberwocky Magazine at the age of thirteen. The Two Mouseketeers was hardly an illustrious beginning – but great things were yet to come.
At the age of nineteen, Vicki set off on a solo expedition to Africa. Falling in love with the continent and the freedom of travel, she felt a yearning to go further and explore even more far-flung corners of the planet.
Vicki’s advertising career helped power her wanderlust even further, taking her from New Zealand, to the concrete jungles of London, Dubai and Singapore. Travel writing soon followed as she chronicled her adventures of more than fifty countries that she had by now visited – from ancient souks in Yemen, to the glaciers of Greenland.
An introduction to the New Zealand Herald, many years later, set her on a more professional trajectory, as well as discovering the joys and pains of writing – having slogged through ten drafts of her first travel story before it was fit for publication, she vowed to give up on such a frustrating pastime. But the hard labour was quickly forgotten when she logged onto the NZ Herald’s website, via a shaky satellite connection in the Bwindi Impenetrable forest in Uganda. The moment she saw her carefully crafted words in print, she immediately began to draft her next story.
The idea of taking on the formidable task of writing a novel was conceived aboard a glorious dahabiya on the river Nile in Egypt, where the Victoria West series was born.
And as Vicki lounged on deck, with a cooling lemon drink in one hand and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile in the other, a fortuitous sign sailed past in the shape of the SS Sudan – the exact same vessel that Agatha herself had sailed on in 1933 – a time when one dressed for dinner and travelled in utmost style.
It was at this point that Vicki decided to bring back the fun and glamour of the old Golden Age detective novel in a new crime series that would put a modern twist on the classic murder mystery – each book set in a new and exotic location so readers could escape to glamorous places and enjoy new cultures … all while figuring out whodunnit!