Sulari Gentill has won the 2018 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel, presented by the Australian Crime Writers Association, for her novel Crossing the Lines.

The book is a standalone, separate to her eight-volume ‘Rowland Sinclair Mystery’ series that follows a group of artists-cum-detectives through 1930s Sydney and beyond.

However, Gentill revealed to Good Reading in a podcast interview earlier this year that the idea for Crossing the Lines was inspired by her increasingly complicated relationship with her character Rowland Sinclair.

In Crossing the Lines, two crime writers write each other’s storyline in a speculative and suprising exploration of literature, truth and reality.

The ACWA judges said that the winning book is an ‘intricate dance of mystery and psychological suspense that blurs the lines between real and fictional, sanity and insanity, obsession and love’.

The judges awarded Melbourne crime writer Sarah Bailey with the award for Best First Crime Novel for her debut, The Dark Lake.

Listen to Good Reading’s podcast interviews with Sulari Gentill and Sarah Bailey.