Find Me

It is 1988 in Australia and people are missing. And when one goes missing, many more are lost.
In outback Queensland, quiet and reserved teenager Leesa Richards disappears silently from her bedroom into the fog early one morning. Cowboy Toby White leaves his pregnant wife Alice in a cloud of dust and mystery, never to be seen again. A world away, in the hustling inner city suburbs of Sydney, rebellious teenager Keely Johnson forms an elaborate plan to escape her boring suburban life and trade it for the excitement and glamour of the streets of Kings Cross.

The only child of southwest Queensland sheep pastoralists, Rhiannon McVee has her eyes firmly set on swapping her cowboy boots for police-issue brogues. But with her parents and the love of her life Mac pressuring her to stay close to home, will her quest to find the missing be over before it begins?

From the harsh isolated Australian outback to the dangerous underbelly of Kings Cross, Rhiannon learns the hard way that when so many slip through the cracks, finding them is never as easy as it seems. And that when you leave the people you love, you might lose them forever.

FIND ME is a mix of crime and a delicate touch of outback romance, inspired by the author’s own personal missing persons tragedy. If you love Australian mystery and crime thrillers by Jane Harper (The Dry) and Candice Fox (Troppo), you’ll love the Detective Rhiannon McVee crime mystery series by bestselling Australian author Melissa Pouliot.

Melissa Pouliot, described by one of her children as a ’book writing machine’, likes to think of herself as a word artist. Her local newspaper published her first story ’Santa’s Elf’ when she was eight years old. Her early childhood stories about princesses, fairies and goblins, inspired by authors such as Enid Blyton and May Gibbs, evolved to teenage soap operas influenced by Sweet Valley High and crime mysteries by Trixie Beldon. While studying a Commerce university degree, she wrote her first unpublished piece for friends and family based on when she worked as a governess in outback Queensland. After an epiphany on a train to Sydney, she changed her university studies from numbers to words and enrolled in a Journalism degree. She returned to the harsh outback Queensland heat for her first newspaper job before moving south to the flat, arid landscape of Western Victoria to work in the busy newsroom of a tri-weekly paper. When her first child was six months old she started her own media company, the first of its type in Western Victoria. Through her journalism career and her own business, she has written stories on just about every topic. Her stories about people are widely recognised as her true heart and she has published several non-fiction books. ’Write About Me’ is Melissa’s debut fiction novel and a #1 Amazon bestseller. In 2014 she released the first in the Rhiannon McVee Crime Mystery Series ’FIND ME’, a year later the second in the series ’WHEN YOU FIND ME’ and in 2016 she released ’YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME’. Melissa’s writing is inspired by the disappearance of her cousin Ursula Barwick in 1987. She is the only Australian author who is a family member of a missing person tackling the complexities of missing through fiction. As a result of her books, detectives have formed Taskforce Hemingway to investigate the circumstances surrounding Ursula’s disappearance. The Australian Federal Police has endorsed all her novels for their role in raising awareness for missing persons. While she continues her fiction writing path, Melissa is also continuing her quest to raise awareness for missing persons through fiction, while raising awareness for child and teen safety as an Ambassador for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s Day for Daniel.