The Search for Anne Perry

Can you really reinvent yourself? This enthralling biography of crime writer Anne Perry reveals more than her identity as teenage killer Juliet Hulme - it also peels back the layers of Anne's carefully constructed life to show us the woman beneath.

In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the film Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. this film launched Jackson's international career. It also forever changed the life of Anne Perry, an award-winning, bestselling crime writer, who at the time of the film's release was publicly outed as Juliet Hulme, one of the murderers. A new light was now cast, not only on Anne's life, but also her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths, and confronting, dark issues including infanticide and incest.

Acclaimed literary biographer Joanne Drayton intersperses the story of Anne's life with an examination of her writing, drawing parallels between Anne's own experiences and her characters and storylines. Anne's books deal with miscarriages of justice, family secrets exposed, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, themes made all the more poignant in light of her past. Anne has sold 25 million books worldwide and published in 15 different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories. Drayton was been given unparalleled access to Anne, her friends, relatives, colleagues and archives to complete the book. the result is a compelling read which provides an understanding of the girl Anne was, the adult she became, her compulsion to write and her view of the world.

"A pleasure for Perry's loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well . . . Drayton tells a beguiling story of an author's climb to the best-seller lists and how a secret she would rather keep hidden was publicly made known." ——Kirkus Reviews

"A solid, well-documented literary biography. Drayton . . . examines Perry’s many novels in light of her earlier life, showing how some of her books’ themes reflect the turmoil and violence of her younger years and, in effect, showing how, though Perry might have left Hulme’s identity behind, the environment that shaped her younger life has also shaped her literary life."— —Booklist“

"The Search for Anne Perry is a terrific biography—and absolutely ingeniously structured.” ——Terry Castle, cultural commentator and author of The Professor and Other Writings