Something He Did is the first crime novel from bestselling New Zealand author and journalist Sarah-Kate Lynch, writing as SK Lynch. Known for her foodie rom-coms, a switch to writing gritty television shows unleashed a thirst for dark twists that Sarah-Kate didn’t know she had. This, combined with a growing frustration at injustices both big and small, personal and professional, colluded with a real-life road rage incident to spark the idea – what if a single collision causes one life to soar while the other crashes and burns? And who should pay the price
It was the end of 2021 and Victoria was coming out of the world’s worst lockdown when we arrived at the end of November to settle there.
The city was kind of crazy – understandable – but it was also freezing cold and wet and windy and we were struggling to find anywhere nice to live because we have our own house in New Zealand so didn’t have a rental history.
On top of this, within our first week, I ended up in hospital. I was stuck in a room for two days with an anti-vaxxer who never stopped talking and I did not even know, physically, where the hospital was. My husband had dropped me off at A and E not realising that Covid restrictions were still in play so he could not come in.
I was spat out a couple of days later feeling like I’d just been to Mars and we were on the way to his work so I could drop him off and have the car when a ute pulled out in front of us without warning and forced us on to the median strip. The ute itself was stuck so it was a lose-lose situation all around.
Shocked, I looked across at the ute driver at which point he gave me the fingers and mouthed an obscenity.
My husband, furious, got out to check for damage but I was oddly calm. I got out of the car, approached the driver – a middle-aged man in a hi-vis vest – and simply asked him why, of all the things he could have done, he chose that.
“Something to do,” he said.
But here’s the thing. Even as he said it, I could tell he didn’t mean it. I could tell he was embarrassed or even ashamed but he didn’t know how to handle it. In that moment, I wondered what had turned him into that sort of person; what pressure he was under to act like such a dick; to endanger his own life and that of a complete stranger’s.
“Well, next time,” I said, “could you try something else – like being kind.”
The look on his face was one of mortification disguised as aggression but he couldn’t quite pull it off. The aggression looked glued on.
As we disengaged the vehicles and went on our way, I turned to my husband and said: “What if what I said to him changed his life, like, in a good way? And what if it changed the life of the person he ran into as well, but in the opposite direction?”
In 2026, that is the premise of my debut crime novel, Something He Did. A disgruntled former All Black captain runs a downtrodden young mum off the road in Melbourne rush hour traffic and as a result, he improves his life for the better, but she begins a devastating downward spiral.
Into this sliding doors story steps Detective Sergeant Claudia Russo, charged a year after the near-collision with finding the All Black captain’s missing 18-year-old daughter. How their lives are linked becomes clearer as the novel progresses but at its heart is that road rage incident and with it the idea that actions have consequences, so be prepared to deal with them.
Obviously, the consequence for me was that I got the idea for my first book in 12 years and my debut crime novel. But I often wonder whether the ute driver went back to work and quit his job, or got back with his wife, or re-connected with his children, or dumped the mates who are always egging him on to be a dick, or relieved himself of some of the pressure he was under to start being a better human.
Probably not, right?
But dreams are free and I might not have changed his life, but he certainly changed mine.
