"It's one thing to pick up a thriller," he says.

"You leave your sense of credibility at the door, you know it's going to be about some guy who single handedly saves the world.

"But it's another thing to pick up a novel which is in 'soccer mum territory' where you could picture yourself in that world."

Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, The Girl Before and now Robotham's The Secrets She Keeps, all cover, at their core, everyday events.

"Most of us know women who have been cheated on, or have cheated, who've had trouble getting pregnant, who accidentally fall pregnant," he says.

"They're issues we've all been touched by and that makes domestic noir the easiest thing to relate to."

He asks that we don't give too much away about the plot of The Secrets She Keeps, he hates it when reviewers do that.

"It destroys the magic of it," he says, "Think of movies with great twists, The Crying Game, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, if you know the twist before you see it it destroys the whole impact of it."

But we'll give a little away. It's the story of two women, Agatha and Meg, told from both their perspectives, each has something in common and each has a secret. There's a sense of great foreboding from the first page. Robotham's had the story tucked away since the early 1990s when, working as a journalist, he covered a similar case to how this story unfolds.

As he embarks on a national tour he's thinking how he can tell the story, without giving the story away.

"I think I'll spend a lot of time talking about capturing female voices and about the number of mummy blogs I read and pregnant women I spoke to and how I immersed myself into that world."

That's all we'll say about the plot. For Robotham, anyway, it's more about the characters.

He's a big fan of the "unreliable narrator", saying Gillian Flynn set the standard with Gone Girl, and here he's given us two.

"Readers normally want to really trust their narrator, they get upset if they think they're being lied to or information is being withheld," he says.

"In this book you wonder who you can really trust.

"But then again we're all unreliable narrators of our own lives, I think that's why people can relate to it."

He enjoyed writing in the female voice too. While he's ghostwritten for Geri Halliwell and Lulu among others, he knows he went out on a limb trying to capture the female perspective.

"Any man writing from a female's perspective is taking an enormous risk," he says.

"And to write out such deeply female subject matter, like pregnancy, childbirth, childlessness, was an extra one."

He thinks back to his third novel, The Night Ferry, where he wrote from the perspective of a woman, Alicia Barber, a 28-year-old Anglo Indian policewoman.

"I remember in hindsight being terrified because I'd not only taken on the whole new gender but a whole new cultural identity as well," he says.

"Now there's this whole debate about cultural appropriation and gender appropriation, it's a minefield.

"There are people out there who think as a middle-aged white guy living in the suburbs that's all I should be able to write about which is completely insane."

In 2015 Robotham won the UK's prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for his standalone thriller Life or Death. He remembers the awards night well.

"The night was amazing, everyone's there congratulating me, and someone kept grabbing me trying to pull me away, saying 'Jo wants to meet, Jo wants to meet you'. I turned around and said quite loudly 'Who the f*** is Jo?' And the crowd parts and there's J.K. Rowling, this sweet angelic woman standing there. She laughed and was absolutely charming about it all."

The Secrets She Keeps, by Michael Robotham, Hachette, $32.99.

Michael Robotham will be talking at the National Library of Australia on July 27, from 6-8pm. $20 includes refreshments and book signing. For bookings nla.gov.au https://www.nla.gov.au/event/author-talk-with-michael-robotham

Michael Robotham's Sydney tour includes talks on July 26 at Chatswood Library, 12.30pm, and Mosman Library, 7pm. August 9 at Warringah Library, 6.30pm. August 10, Middle Harbour Yacht Club Literary Lunch, 12.30pm. August 17, Sutherland Library 6.30pm.