When I finished The Long Grass, I wasn't entirely sure whether Detective Sergeant Annette Mollison would ever investigate another murder. The truth is, when I first started writing the book, Annette Mollison didn't really exist beyond a name. I needed another detective on the investigation, decided that detective would be a woman and Annette began from there.

What I hadn't expected was how much I would come to like her.

As The Long Grass developed, so did Annette. She became more interesting, more complex and, increasingly, more important to the story than I'd ever intended. Somewhere along the way, a character I'd created simply because I needed another detective became someone I genuinely wanted to keep writing about.

By the time I finished the novel, I realised I wasn't quite finished with Annette Mollison.

Apparently, Annette had other ideas too.

I'm now well into writing the second novel in what has become the Detective Sergeant Annette Mollison series, and this time the story takes us forward two years, to Far North Queensland in 1987.

The new novel actually begins ten years earlier.

In 1977, somewhere in the remote country outside Weipa, a young woman disappears. A Chrysler Valiant Drifter panel van disappears with her.

Neither is seen again.

Until 1987.

Two kangaroo shooters travelling through isolated country discover an old vehicle almost completely swallowed by the bush. Inside are human remains and the remnants of lives that seem to have been left untouched for a decade.

What begins as the investigation of an old, abandoned vehicle soon becomes something considerably larger.

Annette Mollison, now a Detective Senior Sergeant based in Cairns, is sent back to Weipa with Detective Sergeant Warwick Wilson, another familiar face from The Long Grass. But before they can begin to understand what happened ten years earlier, the investigation takes a violent and unexpected turn.

And the deeper they dig, the more questions emerge.

Who owned the Valiant? Who are the people whose belongings have survived inside it? Why was the vehicle hidden so carefully? And, perhaps most importantly, how many people actually disappeared?

I'm having enormous fun writing this one because it allows me to return to the Far North Queensland of the 1980s while taking Annette in a very different direction. The investigation stretches beyond Weipa and Cape York, and some apparently insignificant objects discovered along the way begin pointing towards events and people much further afield.

There is also another investigation unfolding back in Cairns — one involving money, influence and possible corruption — which may prove rather less separate from Annette's murder investigation than it first appears.

As with The Long Grass, I'm trying to make the setting more than simply a backdrop. The isolation, communities, wildlife, tropical bush and sheer distances of Far North Queensland all influence what happens and, just as importantly, what could have remained hidden there for ten years.

I'm not ready to reveal the title yet — largely because I haven't settled on one — and I'm certainly not going to tell you what Annette eventually finds.

But she's back.

And once again, something that has been hiding in the long grass is beginning to surface.

— Peter Morris