ABC investigative journalist Louise Milligan switches from news to ...

In Louise Milligan's debut novel, Pheasants Nest, journalist Kate Delaney goes missing after a night out in Melbourne's inner north.

She's trapped in the boot of a stranger's car heading up the Hume Highway, but suspicion inevitably falls on her boyfriend, Liam.

The tension ratchets up as Kate's attacker — a slow-witted sexual offender known only as The Guy — tries to outrun police while holding Kate captive.

Milligan, an investigative reporter for ABC TV's Four Corners, has made her name covering some of the nation's biggest stories, including the trial of Cardinal George Pell and, more recently, an exposé of the toxic culture at an elite Sydney private school.

Her first foray into fiction draws on her long career in journalism, particularly her coverage of the rape and murder of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher in 2012. 

It was a case Milligan found highly distressing.

"I had been the first journalist to interview her husband, Tom Meagher, who was just a lovely guy," she tells ABC RN's The Book Show.

"It was such a terrible situation; this woman plucked from the street and murdered, just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

In Pheasants Nest, Milligan explores a different narrative: What would happen if a woman in a similar situation survived the attack? 

As a busy journalist juggling work and family commitments, Milligan is very familiar with the long road between Sydney and Melbourne.

It's a trip she's never particularly enjoyed.

"I always found that stretch of road [between] the Southern Highlands … and the lower outskirts of Sydney quite a creepy, gothic sort of place — because I knew the stories," she says.

The Hume Highway is where Ivan Milat approached his seven victims before murdering them and dumping their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest between 1989 and 1992.

There are also tragic stories about Pheasants Nest bridge, which crosses the Nepean river and is a notorious suicide spot.

It's also where two teenage boys died in 1998 after they became trapped inside the bridge pylons.

"When I was a young newspaper journalist, I covered a coronial inquest about a young man who had jumped from the Pheasants Nest bridge," Milligan says.

"The thing that really stayed with me was the PTSD burden that these local cops lived with … I just felt so moved by what they had had to go through."

Milligan says she felt a chill every time she drove over the Pheasants Nest bridge.(Supplied: Allen & Unwin)

The fictional police officer leading the search for Kate Delaney in Milligan's novel is Peter D'Ambrosio, a veteran cop dealing with the effects of PTSD acquired in the course of duty.

His character is drawn from the "dozens and dozens" of former and serving police officers who have shared their stories with Milligan over the years.

In a series of stories published in 2013, Milligan revealed the poor treatment many police officers received from the NSW Police insurer when they were off work due to PTSD.

"Police often get a really hard rap, and understandably so in some cases where they have done things that are not appropriate," Milligan says.

"But one thing that often gets lost is the terrible things that they have to see in their job, and that when they try to speak up about how it's affected them, no-one really wants to know about it."

In the novel, D'Ambrosio's illness isn't taken seriously by the insurance company, which considers him a malingerer and hires private investigators to gather evidence to reject his claim.

He is forced to return to work despite still suffering symptoms such as flashbacks, anxiety and stress-induced giant urticaria. This makes his skin break out in angry red welts.

With little else to latch onto, he becomes heavily invested in the Kate Delaney missing persons case.

"He's desperate … to find this girl — not just because the chief commissioner wants him to find her because it's a high-profile case and the media is going nuts over it because it's one of theirs — but because he just needs to have a happy ending. He needs it so badly," Milligan says.

Milligan wrote the first three chapters of Pheasants Nest in a flurry in early 2015.

"I had just done a drive up the Hume Highway, and it got into my bones," she says.

But then work got in the way.

Milligan travelled to Indonesia to cover the Bali Nine executions and then to Ballarat to cover the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Milligan's coverage of the royal commission led her to an investigation of Cardinal George Pell. Next were her two acclaimed non-fiction books — the Walkley award-winning Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (2017) and Witness (2020), which won the People's Choice Award at the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

"For many years, Pheasants Nest just stayed as a file in my computer, and every now and then I would think … 'Oh, I'd love to go back to that'. But I just didn't have the time," she says.

In 2022, Milligan finally took some time off.

"I'd had years and years of doing this really high stakes, tough journalism, and I just needed to take a bit of a breather," she says.

Milligan says she and her character Kate Delaney share a journalist's trademark gallows humour.(ABC Backstory)

She returned to the unfinished manuscript and, after some tinkering, sent the file to her friend Louise Adler, who had published her previous two non-fiction books.

Adler — who, Milligan learned, was a closet "crime fiction nut" — sent back an enthusiastic response.

Milligan wrote another six chapters while in social isolation thanks to COVID.

"Then I was off … These characters were living in my head," she says.

The veteran reporter found the process of writing therapeutic.

"I had been dealing with a lot of secondary trauma over many, many years, and I found this was an outlet," she says.

Readers will notice Milligan and the character of Kate Delaney share many similarities.

Some are trivial — such as their dislike of "cross-cultural pizza" and restaurants with bad chairs and menus that use daggy fonts.

More significant is their shared profession.

As a journalist, Kate knows how the story of her abduction will play out in the tabloid media, including the inevitable suspicion that will be placed on her boyfriend, Liam.

"It usually is the boyfriend," Milligan acknowledges. "That's the narrative."

The pair share another important feature — their Irish Catholic heritage.

Born in Dublin to a large Catholic family, Milligan emigrated to Australia when she was six.

"I was brought up very, very Catholic. I read the Bible cover to cover when I was eight," she says.

In Pheasants Nest, both Kate and Liam come from "generations of mad Catholics" and bond over their shared heritage; he knows the words to her favourite prayer and recognises the baby Jesus figurine — the Child of Prague — standing on her bookshelf.

Milligan says while it wasn't a deliberate decision, it's not surprising Catholicism figures heavily in her writing.

"It makes sense that Catholicism weaves its way through my novel because it's so much a part of who I am."

However, Milligan raises some salient differences between her and Kate.

"She's an only child; I have two brothers. Her father was a very, very difficult man, [but] my father is the nicest man [you'd] meet in your whole life," Milligan says.

"She's not me."

Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan is published by Allen & Unwin.