Discover the books of Melissa Pouliot
Having been a writer her whole life through a media career, Melissa Pouliot always wanted to write books. In 2010, after the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre and NSW Police made a highly public appeal for information about her missing cousin Ursula Barwick, Melissa started writing her first crime fiction novel.
She set Write About Me in the nineteen-eighties in Kings Cross, Sydney – the time and place of the last known sighting of Ursula. Write About Me reached number one on Amazon bestseller lists within months of its release. It also prompted people to come forward with new information about Ursula, including letters to a school friend that proved police had several facts wrong including the date she went missing.
After intense lobbying by Melissa and more new information, in 2014 Kings Cross Detectives started a new investigation into Ursula’s mysterious cold case.
Melissa kept writing as a way of keeping attention on Ursula, with each book launch providing an opportunity to plead for people to come forward with more information. Her crime thriller Detective Rhiannon McVee series starts with FIND ME and continues with When You Find Me, You’ll Never Find Me, Search for Sky, Rhiannon’s Last Look. These page-turning novels have her readers transfixed on what’s going to happen next (thanks to ending on cliffhangers!)
Writing also helped keep Melissa work through reliving the trauma of losing Ursula and wondering for almost three decades if she was dead or alive before miraculously, she was FOUND.
FOUND
Five frantic years after her first public conversation about Ursula, Melissa published FOUND. It’s release coincided with the real-life drama that unfolded when detectives discovered Ursula died only weeks after her disappearance.
All Melissa’s novels are all endorsed by the Australian Federal Police National Missing Persons Coordination Centre for raising awareness for missing people. They have featured at international conferences and captured the hearts and minds of other families of missing people around the world.
LASTING LEGACY
Through her public conversations Melissa has shown her beautiful, fun-loving, outgoing, fabulously witty, adventurous and brave cousin Ursula is not just another one-dimensional face on a missing persons’ poster.