Who is Australian Detective Rhiannon McVee?

I first met Detective Rhiannon McVee when I was writing my debut novel, Write About Me, inspired by the 1987 disappearance of my teenage cousin Ursula. She only appears fleetingly in the book and was not a detective at that point, but it was a key moment. When my fictional character, Annabelle Brown, arrives in Kings Cross and stands at the corner where you can see the El Alamein fountain, Kings Cross Police Station and the full length of Darlinghurst Road up to the Coke Sign – this young policewoman named Rhiannon McVee, who had just started at her first real policing job, notices her.

As momentum gathered behind the scenes for the real life search for Ursula, Rhiannon kept turning up in my head so I started a new crime fiction series and her character started to form.

She was born in the Australian outback, southwest Queensland; the only child of sheep graziers with a strong sense of adventure. She was always a tomboy and preferred being outdoors with her Dad, Bill. When she decides she wants to pursue a police career she has her sights set on the bright city lights of Sydney and her first job is at Kings Cross. Immediately she is drawn to missing persons cases at a time, the late 1980s, when police attitudes to a lot of missing persons cases are dismissive, careless and sloppy. Rhiannon wants to change that!

But, and there’s always a but, Rhiannon has a doting cowboy waiting for her to return to him in the outback. He’s patient, kind, rugged, good with his hands, hard working and gives her stomach butterflies. Long before Rip entered our lives on the small screen in Yellowstone, there was Mac.

In the five books so far of my Rhiannon Series, it has been such a pleasure to get to know Rhiannon and travel through her ups and downs, good decisions and bad decisions.

In Rhiannon’s Last Look, I finally feel she is starting to really come into her own. Although she hasn’t changed at heart, when she first enters our lives in Find Me she is young, fearless, a little bit spoilt and self-absorbed. At the same time a perfectionist, dedicated, passionate, adventurous and relentless in her pursuit of the truth for her missing cases.

I invented Detective Rhiannon McVee because she was who I wished was investigating Ursula’s case from the day she disappeared from Kings Cross. My view at the time was, if we’d had a Detective Rhiannon McVee, it wouldn’t have taken 30 years for us to discover what happened to our Ursula.

In Australia, on average, 150 people are reported missing every day. Of those 90% are found safe and well within a week and 3% are long-term missing people (missing for three months or more). How many people is 3%? More than 2500. Wow. That’s a lot of families who are going through ambiguous loss and wishing they could do something, anything, to bring their loved one home. For those of you living in much more highly-populated countries than Australia, these numbers are a lot higher.

I’ve learnt a lot since I published Write About Me in 2013 and it’s sequel FOUND in 2017, through Rhiannon and my own personal experience.

When someone goes missing, it’s not as simple as having someone like Detective Rhiannonn McVee in charge of the case. This is why I continue to write fiction about ‘missingness’ – it’s an escape from reality and helps me process my own grief, with the hope that it’s helping others too.

Melissa x