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FRIDAY 21 MARCH 2025 | INSTORE EVENT6.00pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins
Join us for a conversation between award winning journalist and author Matthew Condon and Mandy Beaumont about her book The Thrill of It.
ABOUT THE BOOK
On a morning in March of 1989, as Emmerson Kerr walks home from the gym listening to the news radio on her Walkman, she hears the shocking details of the murder of a grandmother: 84 years of age and bashed in the head with a hammer, her shoes taken off and neatly placed beside her body. She has been killed and left in the front entrance of her home for others to find. These, only Emmerson and her mother know, are, twelve years later, the calling cards of her grandmother’s killer. This is the same horrific scenes Emmerson saw in the toilet of her grandmother’s Paddington studio back in 1977. The murder of Marlowe Kerr—Sydney’s art darling, known for her lavish parties and her world-famous wallpaper designs—never solved and forgotten with time.
With her mother not coming back any time soon, Emmerson knows that she is the only one that holds the secrets of the past that can help catch the killer. And, as she begins to uncover the connection between these two murders that happened over a decade apart, a terrifying string of similar crimes start to be reported across the North Shore of Sydney. Older female residents find themselves in a state of constant fear. The media calls the murders a 'reign of terror'; and, as Emmerson’s search for the truth of Marlowe’s death deepens, and the numbers of deaths keep rising around her, she knows she must find the killer before he strikes again.
THE INSPIRATION
The Thrill of It is a work of fiction. It is inspired and informed by the real-life brutal slayings of six older women in Sydney’s Northshore between 1989 and 1990 by English born John Wayne Glover, also known as The Granny Killer. A thrill-killer who became excited by his own acts of violence, Glover was also an opportunist who robbed these women, using their cash to aid his pokies addiction. It is rumoured that back in 1977, Glover also killed the successful and well-known wallpaper designer, artist, clothing designer, solo traveller and socialite Florence Broadhurst, in her studio in Paddington. To date, her killer is still unknown.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A critically acclaimed author, Mandy's debut novel The Furies, was longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize and shortlisted for both the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction Book of the Year 2022 and the MUD Literary Prize 2023.
This new book takes Mandy's literary talent and opens it up to a wider, more commercial crime market with its examination of violence against older women and the mind of a killer. Mandy lives in Northcote, Victoria.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
193 Boundary Street, West End, West End, QLD, Australia, Queensland 4101
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