The Unbelieved

'So you believed the alleged rapists over the alleged victim?' Jane's voice took on an indignant pitch. 'Girls lie sometimes.' I nodded. 'And rapists lie all the time.'

When Senior Detective Antigone Pollard moves to the coastal town of Deception Bay, she is still in shock and grief. Back in Melbourne, one of her cases had gone catastrophically wrong, and to escape the guilt and the haunting memories, she'd requested a transfer to the quiet town she'd grown up in.

But there are some things you can't run from. A month into her new life, she is targeted by a would-be rapist at the pub, and realises why there have been no convictions following a spate of similar sexual attacks in the surrounding district. The male witnesses in the pub back her attacker and even her boss doesn't believe her.

Hers is the first reported case in Deception Bay, but soon there are more. As Antigone searches for answers, she encounters a wall of silence in the town built of secrets and denial and fear. The women of Deception Bay are scared and the law is not on their side. The nightmare has followed her home.

Chilling, timely and gripping, The Unbelieved takes us behind the headlines to a small-town world that is all too real - and introduces us to a brilliant new voice in crime fiction.

Winner of Best Debut Crime Fiction 2023 (Australia) Short-listed for Best Crime Fiction 2023 (Australia) Short-listed for Davitt Awards 2023 (Australia)

Vikki Petraitis has written eighteen books, including her bestseller The Frankston Murders, about Frankston serial killer Paul Denyer. In 2023, she released a podcast of the same name which helped put the case on the international radar. Working as part of a dedicated team, Vikki was in Parliament in November 2023 to witness the passing of the amendment to keep Denyer in prison for life. Vikki has written on topics from Lawyer X to police dogs. She has made several true-crime podcast series with Casefile Presents that have been downloaded eight million times. Vikki's first novel, The Unbelieved, won the inaugural 2022 Allen & Unwin Crime Fiction Prize and the 2023 Readers' Choice Davitt Award. She has just submitted her PhD in Creative Writing and is really hoping she passes. Her second novel, The Stolen, is published in 2025.

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