Virginia Peters' intriguing and elegant true-crime book Have You Seen Simone? has been greeted with admiring reviews but also with legal action against the first-time author. At her recent launch at Byron Bay Writers Festival, Peters was meant to be in conversation with a detective who had helped investigate the unsolved murder of German backpacker Simone Strobel in Lismore in 2005. But he was not there because, as Peters put it, "the story continues beyond the last page" and suddenly the case was a delicate subject. Tobias Suckfuell, who was Strobel's boyfriend and a police suspect in her murder, lives in Perth with his Australian wife and had tried unsuccessfully to stop the book's publication, with an injunction heard in the Supreme Court of Western Australia. Now he has brought a defamation suit against Peters and her publisher, Black Inc., which would hang on whether her book claims he is guilty. The catch for Suckfuell is that the hearing next year could involve 30 or more witnesses, including senior police and medical experts, and effectively become a murder trial. Peters, who told the launch audience she had always wanted to be a detective but was knocked back by the police force, interviewed Suckfuell and many other people in her efforts to solve the mystery.

IF SHE CAN MAKE IT THERE ...

When I was in New York in June, I noticed Australian author Liane Moriarty's fifth novel, The Husband's Secret, prominently displayed in bookshops (as well as other Australian books such as Eyrie by Tim Winton,  All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld and Markus Zusak's perennial The Book Thief). Now her agent, Fiona Inglis,tells Undercover she believes Moriarty is the first Australian author to have two hardbacks on The New York Times bestseller list at the same time. The Husband's Secret has been on the list for more than a year and is still No. 16, with total sales of more than 2 million copies. Moriarty's new novel, Big Little Lies, about the death of a parent after a school trivia night, went straight to No. 1 on publication last month and is No. 5 on Australia's BookScan bestseller list. Sales should continue to boom now that Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have optioned the film and TV rights to Big Little Lies and CBS has rights to The Husband's Secret, in which a woman's life is changed by a letter written by her husband. As well as being a master of suburban tensions, Moriarty, who lives on Sydney's northern beaches with her family, is also a children's author and sister to two other authors, Jaclyn Moriarty and Nicola Moriarty.

TELEVISION BOOK CHAT

ABC News 24 on cable television has a new half-hour arts and entertainment program, The Mix, hosted by James Valentine and broadcast at 6.30pm on Saturdays. This weekend you can watch novelist and critic James Bradley and me in a segment called Pubchat, where we get to talk books with Valentine over a drink at the atmospheric Lord Wolseley Hotel in Ultimo. We touch on the Man Booker Prize, the deluge of new-season books and unexpected recent successes. It's not much but it's great to see the ABC stretching its budget to some TV arts coverage again - and fingers crossed that books become a regular feature.