Sarah Bailey's The Housemate is complicated - and that's a good thing

And that makes it even more interesting that she writes such prickly female characters. In her first three books, The Dark Lake (2017), Into the Night (2018) and Where the Dead Go (2019) she introduced us to detective Gemma Woodstock. Woodstock was a woman barely holding it together. She was plagued with guilt over the death of her high-school sweetheart, ambivalent about her son, having an affair with her partner, annoyed at the world, selfish and full of hate.

"A lot of people didn't like Gemma," Bailey says.

"Hopefully they loved to hate her, you want your characters to provoke some kind of emotion in people, and if it's dislike then that's okay too, I guess."

I loved Gemma. I love books full of complicated women. Gone Girl, Fates and Furies, The Girl on the Train, everything by Liane Moriarty and Sally Hepworth. Too often women are portrayed as innocent victims, or they're lost without a man, or unable to make decisions on their own. I like reading books about women who don't have it all together. Women like me. And I know I'm not alone.

"Women, and men, are complicated and there should be characters who reflect that in literature and film," says Bailey.

So meet Olive Groves. The star of Bailey's latest novel, The Housemate. A standalone thriller full of the complicated characters you've come to expect from Bailey.

She's a journalist who worked on a story as a young cadet that was dubbed the "Housemate Homicide", three housemates, one dead, one missing and one accused of murder. Now, nine years later, the missing housemate has turned up. Oli is teamed up with precocious young reporter Cooper Ng, who's been tasked with turning it into a podcast, and as the pair delve deeper into the past, and the current story, more and more secrets are revealed.

Oli is as equally likeable (or dislikeable) as Gemma. The book opens with her at the original murder, still high from the night before, and as it unfolds you're given glimpses of her past traumas and current indiscretions. She's in a relationship with the widowed partner of a former acquaintance, not quite loving the step-mother role as much as she thought, the ghost of the past hanging over everything.

At work she's bitter and twisted about the future of journalism. (Perhaps this is why I loved her so much?). An old-school reporter stuck with millennials who are more concerned about clicks and podcasts and instant gratification, than they are the facts of the story. And she lets it be known.

"I'd like to think Oli won't be as polarising as Gemma," Bailey says. "But I'm sure there'll be things about her that some readers will not like, or feel as though she's brought upon herself to some extent.

"Her situation is quite complicated, you can see why she's a bit torn in the world she's landed in, why there's the conflict.

"There is this crazy baggage from her childhood which kind of runs in parallel to the crime, it's not the same but it's relevant to the case."

Bailey said it was definitely a challenge taking on new characters for this book but it was something she was keen to do.

"I was definitely less confident writing this one, particularly at the start, it was hard to see how it was all going to play out," she says.

The Housemate has been well reviewed since its launch. I cannot recommend it enough. The first book in quite a while where I've stayed up way too late to finish it.

The crime itself doesn't go where you think it will, skirting the edges of a discussion about who should be responsible for how things play out.

"Like the analogy about the person who pushes the button to launch a missile versus the person who's holding the gun," Bailey says.

But, somewhat indulgently, I loved it for her take on journalism. She had it so right. Oli works for the fictional Melbourne Today newspaper. One of the last few old-school reporters in the newsroom, digging through old notebooks from a decade ago to find contacts and meeting people in pubs to ply them for information. It's how I remember it.

Bailey tells me she originally wanted to be a journalist. She studied journalism and marketing at university and marketing is where she landed.

"I told my publisher this book was me fulfilling my journalism fantasy," she says. "I have such a huge passion and respect for journalism, particularly in the past couple of years, it's been more important than ever before, I like to think Oli is the character who could have been me in a parallel universe."

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Bailey was keen to develop the relationship between Oli and Cooper. In her management role at Melbourne's VMLY&R agency she's well aware of how the dynamics between different generations can play out.

"Cooper was a key character in the book because he symbolises the idea of Oli starting to lose a grip on her career, which has been the one stable thing in her life," Bailey says. "He was irritating to her because of what he represented and in advertising, like journalism, that battle between the old and the new is quite real."

The bulk of The Housemate was written during Melbourne's first lockdown in 2020 and Bailey says it wasn't easy doing everything from home. Has she ever thought about writing full-time?

"I won't lie, there are some days where it's all difficult. I did an experiment a few years ago where I was only working maybe only two days a week in marketing so I had much more flexibility for about four or five months.

"It might not have been pure, I did find Where the Dead Go hard to write, if it had been an easier book I might be in a different place now.

"I found those five or so months quite stressful, particularly from a writing perspective.

"I didn't think the work was as good, I'd spend hours every day writing, but I don't think I got more done than I would have in the hour I was doing previously.

"My job at the moment is pretty meaty, and I do lots with people and relationships and problems, and all the things that come with managing people and I wonder if maybe that's just a good contrast to writing and I think it does help."

There's no book on the horizon, she's just finished writing an audiobook for Audible and waiting to hear about the film and television options on The Dark Lake.

It was optioned in 2017 by Hopscotch Features, the team behind The Water Diviner.

"It was fun writing something new, fun writing new characters, I don't know whether I'll use Oli again, or whether Gemma will come back, and that's half the fun of it all."