Loraine Peck Books In Order

Publication Order of Amy & John Novak Books

Loraine Peck is a literary fiction author from Sydney Australia best known for her debut novel “The Second Son.”
She started out as a magician’s assistant and portrait painter in Sydney before she decided to change course. She was sawn in half too many times that she decided that it was better to deal blackjack on the Gold Coast.

Slinging lobsters and bartending in the United States would result in landing a job in the Australian version of Hollywood which she used to launch a career in marketing. As a marketing executive, she has worked all over the globe in the United States, Australia, Asia and the Middle East.

While she loved her job as a marketer, she had always wanted to write crime thrillers. She took a writing course with Curtis Brown Creative in 2017 where she learned about how to write novels. She published her award winning debut The Second Son in 2021.
Loraine now makes her home in the Gold Coast and Sydney where she lives with her husband.

Peck was born in Grafton in Australia where she was raised by a pilot and an artist and went to school in the Northern Beaches. When she was twelve years old, she wanted a career as a ballerina since she could dance but was very lousy at sports.

When she was eighteen, her flexibility got her a job as a magician’s assistant as she could manage being disappeared and being sawn in half. Nonetheless, what she wanted to do at this age was to paint portraits for a living.

When she was thirty, she got married to a former criminal trying to turn his life around while she was working in film distribution as a sales manager when all she wanted to do was become an author.

But she always believed that she had a lot of time to make a career as an author but with several careers and children to take care of, it turns out that she did not. As for her influences, she cites John Fowle’ novel “The Collector” as its imagery creeped her out and stayed with her ever since she read it as a teenager. For movies, she was influenced by the Quentin Tarantino directed film “True Romance.”

Loraine Peck always wanted to become an author but it was not until she was 54 that she decided it was time to learn how to do it. She took several online and offline courses and with the help of several industry professionals finally published her debut in 2021.

“The Second Son,” which is her debut novel, has been called a modern day “Godfather” story as it tells the story of a man who was born into a crime family and the middle class Australian girl he falls in love with.

Initially, she set out to write an action thriller but the final work is a combination of a psychological thriller, murder mystery and action thriller. She has always held a fascination with people that change their lives either for the worse or for the better. As such, Peck hopes that her readers are just as fascinated with the complex lives that her characters live.

Loraine usually reads for escape and entertainment and hence she admires authors that have the ability to make their readers suspend belief. She likes mayhem and murder with a slice of humor and hence she likes to read the likes of Harlan Coben, Candice Fox, Louisa Luna and Adrian McKinty.
When she is reading thrillers she prefers stories with a twist even though she sometimes reads straightforward stories such as the “Jack Reacher” series. She has also asserted that she got a lot of motivation and learned about storytelling from the likes of James Cain and Raymond Chandler.

Peck was inspired to write her novels and especially the male lead from listening to stories of the teenage life of her Croatian born husband.
He had grown up on the mean streets of the poorer parts of Sydney and she started wondering what it would have been like to be brought up as a member of a crime family. How different would life be if one was a teenager being brought up by a family that lived for crime.

Would he be taught how to use the guns in the family collection and how to set up a protection racket? What would happen when such a person married someone not bred in crime, would they leave their life of crime behind to become a normal person?

Amy the female lead was inspired by the author’s own experiences. She has said that writing the character she spoke from the heart as she knows full well the ferocious desire to protect children as a mother and also the feeling of being an outsider.
It was from all the questions she asked that she finally wrote the novel.

Loraine Peck’s “The Second Son” is set in the mean streets of Western Sydney where Milan, a Croatian father who recently lost his son in a turf war had declared war on the Serbians.

The Serbians and the Croatians have always been sworn enemies and ever since Ivan Milan was killed following two other killings, Milan knows that the Serbians are guilty of it.

He asked Johnny, his second son, to avenge his brother’s death. But Johnny is at a loss at what to do as his wife asks him not to commit the crime for the sake of his immediate family which means he has to choose between the gang and his father.

He decides to take one last job and take Amy along. He has made arrangements for the protection of his son and wife but he never anticipated what happened next. As retribution and threats occur, Johnny and his gang make a plan they believe is fool proof even though there is no guarantee of safety in the crime game.

It is a novel full of gangs, action, revenge attacks and plenty of gun fights that will get its readers on the edge of their seats.