There's the sunshine, peeping out from ubiquitous clouds, rarely with any vitamin D to speak of.

There's the sound of seagulls threaded through coverage of the Australian Open, deep in England's winter.

And for Jessica Stanley, who lives in London with her husband and three young children, there's the constant thrum of Australian politics, a habit that's hard to quit even across the ocean.

So when she set out, a decade ago, to write a murder mystery set partly in Melbourne, where she lived for several years, and partly in Canberra, where she went to university and did a cadetship at The Canberra Times, she knew it would have to involve politics.

Her debut novel, A Great Hope, is an epic family saga set in post-Kevin07 Melbourne, with all the optimism and brewing political intrigue it entailed. It's also a murder mystery, with the towering head of the union movement doing the honours as the corpse in question.

The death of John Clare is officially the result of an accidental fall. But his wife, mistress, daughter, son, friends, colleagues and neighbours are left reeling, and wondering who he really was. Was it an accident, or murder?

Buckle up, readers, it's time for a ride down into mid-2000s politics in Melbourne and Canberra, along the cosily predictable route of a good, old-fashioned murder mystery.

Speaking from London, where some of that rare, wan sunlight is shining onto her desk for the occasion, Stanley says her book is shaped in large part by the piles of murder mysteries she read as a bookish child, and today, as a compulsive adult reader.

"I was just addicted to murder mysteries," she says.

"Like every child who likes to read, I did all the Agatha Christies, every single one. And every year, one of my comfort rereads is PD James.

"I love how - and I give this speech to Sophie [one of the book's characters] - how she sets out a really intricately plotted story, and by the end, you understand everyone, and you know why something happened, you know who did it and why. It's just so calming, I just love it. And so I wanted to have that."

But A Great Hope is more than just a standard whodunnit. In taking the various viewpoints of, in turns, John's wife Grace, his mistress Tessa, his daughter Sophie, son Toby, among others, it's a meditation on love, power, revenge, loneliness, rejection and ambition. It's political, sexy and in many parts downright hilarious, as the voices shift between the repressed rage of a spurned wife, the self-obsessed angst of 20-something students, and the neighbours, staff and colleagues who watch, silently from afar, thinking their own dark thoughts.

"Basically, I wanted it to be political and authentic, and I needed to have that mystery element because a mystery plot is a really calm and safe plot structure," she says.

"And then I wanted to go really deeply into people's secret lives, so you're almost eavesdropping in a voyeuristic or gossipy way on people's darkest thoughts."

All of this needed to fit within the mould Stanley had always been so fond of, but still transcend its borders.

"I knew that I wanted to do something where I went really deeply into women's lives, and that I had a bit of risky material, shameful, extreme emotions and bad behaviour," she says.

"But I know that I don't like reading about that kind of stuff, unless I feel safe in the author's hands. I don't like to open a book and get vicariously traumatised and shocked by really unfiltered writing.

"So one of the ways that I thought I could go really deep, but not just blurt out stuff, was to really carefully arrange the material in a very solid plot that from A to Z, you got taken along every step.

"And at the end, you felt satisfied and like you, the reader, were in control of your journey the whole time, you knew you were going to get to the end, and you got to the end.

"I thought that would make the process safer, so you could go to a more dangerous place in your head.

"You could risk liking a character that you wouldn't necessarily like in real life, and then come to understand them and maybe even like them or love them."

Two other books are key to her own. The first, Damage, by Josephine Hart, is a short novel about an MP who ruins his life with an ill-advised love affair.

The second is her favourite book of all time bar none, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which won the Booker Prize in 2004. It's one of the few books Stanley can quote a line from for pretty much any occasion. It's also set in the 1980s between two Thatcher elections.

"It's my favourite book because it's just so funny," she says, adding that she once attended a reading by the author, and stood in line to have her book signed.

"It was like I was seeing God or something. And I said, 'This is the funniest book I've ever read'. And he said, 'I cried laughing at my own writing when I was writing this, but nobody ever says it's funny'!"

She also loves that its central character is living in the house of an MP. She knew she wanted her own book to involve a senior political figure, but having never worked in an MP's office, she worried about a lack of authenticity.

She did, however, work in the office of then head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Greg Combet, as online manager of the Your Rights At Work campaign in the lead-up to Kevin Rudd's election as prime minister.

"That's why I set A Great Hope in the ACTU, because I worked there for two-and-a-half years, and I saw Greg doing his job up close," she says.

But while many of the book's plot points are based on real events - Rudd's election, the subsequent leadership spill - any resemblance to Combet or his staff is purely accidental.

John Clare, the unfortunate victim, is a political titan, but a flawed one.

"Normally, books I've read in the past, and documentaries about real politics, John would be the main character, and you would get to see him live in his world and, you know, be inside his mind," she says.

"But I had an ethical problem with writing a mystery where the person who died was a woman because I didn't want a woman corpse. So I wanted to flip it and have the man be the corpse.

"And then, I had to make him the political guy, and the only politics that I really knew intimately was the ACTU, so I'm afraid Greg has copped it...

"Greg was and is probably - I mean, I have no idea - a great boss and a great guy. But he had no exciting, dramatic role in my life. John Clare is just an imagined person who has taken his LinkedIn job title. That's it."

There's nostalgia here too, in looking back at what feels like a lifetime ago, before the musical chairs of Australia's leadership was set in motion in 2010.

"I found it so dramatic, and it was back in the days when we felt as if we had all the time in the world to solve Australia's problems," she says.