Matthew Spencer Q&A - Broke Road

Allen & Unwin
Jul 29
4 min read

We chat with author Matthew Spencer about his latest book, Broke Road.

In Broke Road, bestselling author Matthew Spencer delivers another gripping crime thriller featuring Detective Rose Riley. From a haunting opening phone call to the richly layered investigation that follows, Spencer draws on forensic insight, deep procedural research, and a visceral sense of place to craft a story pulsing with tension. In this Q&A, he shares the real-life inspiration behind the chilling case, his evolving connection to Riley, and the surprising turns the novel took along the way.

A&U: Hey Matthew, thank you so much for chatting with us! Broke Road opens with a chilling phone call—what inspired this case, and how did the story take shape from there?

MS: The case stems from a discussion I had with a forensic pathologist. He explained how he would go about murdering someone in a way that would create confusion or consternation for a forensic pathologist such as himself at autopsy. In other words, he was telling me how he would go about committing an undetectable murder. That became the foundational idea of Broke Road, and the phone call at the beginning of the novel is the Homicide cop, Riley, being woken in her bed and sent out to a scene in the lower Hunter Valley where a woman has been found dead in her home. I wanted to drop the reader straight into it: Riley travels to the scene and we go with her. The story unfolds from there.

A&U: Detective Rose Riley is a standout character. What drew you to her voice, and how has she evolved since Black River?

MS: Riley began as one of three main characters in the early drafts of my first novel, Black River, but as the manuscript developed, she began to emerge from the shadow of her boss—Homicide Chief Inspector O’Neil—and become the dominant voice of the book (alongside the journalist, Bowman). I think that’s what drew me to Riley: she’s a foil to Bowman, almost an antidote to the journalist. With Broke Road, the process continued, and Riley is the heart of the book: the opening four chapters are purely from her perspective. And the murder scene is on the edge of the district where Riley grew up, so she’s approaching her childhood home. Riley and her family left the region when she was eleven, so she’s not running into family or close friends, but nonetheless there’s a lot of memories for her here.

A&U: The Hunter Valley setting feels so alive—both its beauty and its darker corners. Why did you choose this region for the book?

MS: It’s geology, for a start. Triassic cliffs, a Permian swamp. I’m fascinated by that stuff: there’s a line in Black River about how Sydney sits on sandstone washed down from Broken Hill a quarter of a billion years ago. The Hunter’s industries come from its geology—coal and wine. I was interested in how they don’t come together, how the coalmining town of Cessnock stands apart from the wine industry, how it refuses to become any sort of centre for wine tourism. From there, I had communities rubbing each other up the wrong way, creating friction.

A&U: You’ve been praised for your police procedural detail. What kind of research do you do to get it so right?

MS: I had professionals who I interviewed for Black River, and they were willing to talk to me again for Broke Road. That was invaluable, and they were all very generous with their expertise and their time. I talked with a Homicide detective, a forensic investigator, and the forensic pathologist I mentioned earlier. There were others I spoke with, but those three were my primary sources. And it was ongoing, through the book. If I got stuck, or felt I needed a jolt of reality, I’d go back to them with whatever it was that was the problem. As I say, they were very generous with their time! So there is a seam of real procedure in the book. I find I like to start with that and then expand. As I push out into fiction, literally making it up, I just try to keep it convincing. It’s not my job to be factual, it’s my job to bring the reader along for the ride. My editors are critical here too, as one of them is even married to a cop. We really work at verisimilitude—to remove anything that might cause a reader to start doubting our credibility. That comes down to the smallest details. If a reader starts doubting the small stuff, it won’t be long before they’ll put the book down.

A&U: Without giving too much away—what surprised you most while writing Broke Road?

MS: I feel there’s a greater richness to this book, compared with Black River. I don’t know if it’s better, but I feel there’s more meat on the bones—in character, in place, in plot. That’s a result of time—it took three years to write. That’s a lot of redrafting, and a lot of collaboration—I had a lot of feedback and support from my publishers and early readers, in particular my structural editor Kate Goldsworthy. The result of all that it is I think ‘Wow, look where things ended up from where we started!’ And the other surprise, and this heads to spoiler territory so I’ll shut up, except to say that I write by the seat of my pants, there’s no whiteboard or even an outline of what’s happening or where things might be heading, and the value in that is you can change course—you can end up with this character doing something, when all along you thought it would be someone else …

Broke Road is available in bookstores now.