Vikki’s early attempts at writing were fiction. To combat her lack of real world knowledge, she began reading true crime and became hooked on the genre. Coming full circle, after 17 true crime books, she decided to turn her hand to fiction with The Unbelieved.
Vikki Petraitis has written 20 books, including her best-selling book The Frankston Murders about Frankston serial killer Paul Denyer. In 2023, she released a podcast of the same name which helped put the case on the international radar. Working as part of a small, dedicated lobby group, Vikki was in Parliament in November 2023 to witness the passing of the amendment to keep Denyer in prison for life.
Vikki has written on topics from Lawyer X to police dogs. She made her first book, The Phillip Island Murder into her first podcast series called The Vanishing of Vivienne Cameron which was released by Casefile Presents in 2020. It was shortlisted in the Australian Podcast Awards the following year. Vikki made a third series Searching for Sarah MacDiarmid, then a series with Emily Webb called The Unthinkable. In total, her podcasts have been downloaded over ten million times.
Vikki’s first fiction, The Unbelieved, was written as part of her PhD in Creative Writing. It won the inaugural 2022 Allen & Unwin Crime Fiction Prize and the 2023 Readers’ Choice Davitt Award. The Unbelieved was optioned by Moonriver in the UK and actor Anna Torv signed on to play the lead character. The first two episodes of the series – renamed Dustfall – premiered at Series Mania in Paris in March 2026 and won the Audience Award. And the ABC announced that Dustfall is one of their premier TV series for 2026 and will air on 11 October. It will also air internationally on the BBC and the ZDF.
The sequel to The Unbelieved — The Stolen — was released in 2025. The third book in the series — The Reckoning — came out in September 2026.
Vikki was awarded her PhD in May 2026.
