She will be at Echuca Library in Hare St at 2.30pm on Sunday, June 5, for afternoon tea.
Ruth was the 2000 winner of the Great Clarendon House Writing Challenge and will be signing books at the library.
Her book is based around a Murray River town, like the one she grew up in, itsharsh landscape and open spaces.
“I love setting stories in the regional and rural parts of Australia where I grew up. It’s a harsh landscape with vast open spaces, sparse populations, floods, trees, isolation,” she said.
Ruth made a decision to semi retire and take up writing when she had two friends die from cancer and another develop Parkinson’s.
“It made me realise I’d already ‘wasted’ too much time doing things that others expected me to do. It was time to follow my lifelong passion for writing,” she said.
She has worked in a psychiatric hospital kitchen, a car dealership, a factory making springs, a telephone counselling service, a funeral parlour and crematorium.
“I also worked in law firms — and one in particular — a criminal law firm set my writing imagination on fire. Everywhere I’ve worked has taught me something,” she said.
The Whitworth Mysteries, her first published book, is a collection of crime fiction stories set in the fictional location of Whitworth. It is located on the Murray River and is loosely based on Mildura, where she grew up and went to school.
She said when she and her family moved to a farm hours in Mildura there was no running water, no washing machine, no indoor toilet, and lighting inside at night was provided by a diesel generator.
“I spent the first five years of my life living in a caravan annex in the middle of Wilkurra Station. When I was old enough to go to school mum and I moved ‘into town’. My father continued working on the station coming home every couple of weeks,” she said.
Bookings for her visit are available on 5481 2400.