This is Ink & Intrigue—the blog where romance ignites, secrets simmer, and every love story hides a twist. I’m your blog host, Sheila Kell, romance author and lover of plot twists, slow burns, and morally questionable book boyfriends.

Today, I’m thrilled to introduce you to an author whose stories captivate the heart—Meryl Brown Tobin! If you love multi-layered romantic suspense, you’re in for a treat.

Meryl Brown Tobin is known for crafting unforgettable stories. Her novel, Broome Enigma, is a romantic suspense novel with so many twists and turns you will be flipping through the pages to find out what happens.

In this spotlight, Meryl Brown Tobin shares her writing journey and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how she develops chemistry in Broome Enigma.

Whether you write love stories, devour them, or dream of doing both—you’re in the right place. Let’s get into it and give a warm welcome to Meryl Brown Tobin! 💖

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1. What drew you to writing romance in particular?

The genre, which I would prefer to call Love Story, chose me. In writing Love Story/Romantic Suspense with depth, I can include all the things that I know, observe, imagine and value, such as respectful versus exploitative relationships, travel and environmental and humanitarian issues. As a fan of detective television series, such as ‘Vera’, I like to expand my romantic novels to include more than suspense of a romantic nature. It might be suspense generated by mystery and/or crime or issues of the time, such as environmental and/or social issues.

My novels are about ordinary people meeting and falling in love and overcoming obstacles in life and in the two attracted to each other getting together. Life’s all about choices, and, if you make the wrong one, you don’t have to keep making more and compounding the problems you have. It’s about respectful relationships and the valuing of them and living as happy a life as possible.

In my time I have seen a lot of dysfunctional relationships. I would like my readers to enjoy reading my books and feel good about themselves and about the world and maybe learn something they didn’t know before. I want them to feel they have spent time with pleasant people who have faced up to and overcome serious challenges. In so doing, hopefully they will have insights into their own challenges.

2. Can you tell us about your latest romantic suspense novel and what inspired the story?

Broome Enigma is a multi-layered love story set in Broome in Outback Australia in 1986. The following blurb sums it up.

On a working holiday in Australia’s cosmopolitan Outback town of Broome, Jodie, a young book designer and artist, is open to romance and adventure. At the holiday village where she is staying, she meets Joe, a young man who works there. Despite the strong attraction between them, the many unknowns about his earlier life keep them apart. To try to uncover his mysterious past, they travel to Perth and back to Broome and are drawn into not only bizarre but also dangerous situations.

Is Joe the person she thinks he is, or is he some alter ego? Can Jodie and Joe stop their relationship from developing until they have answers and know if he is free to love her?

My husband Hartley and I have travelled extensively throughout the Australian Outback and love Broome, a cosmopolitan coastal town in Western Australia, which I chose as the setting of my novel. On one of our trips a handsome, suntanned, but unsmiling young man dressed only in jeans and sandals, was the maintenance man in one of the Outback caravan parks at which we stayed.  Because he didn’t ‘fit’ and I wanted to make him fit, I played the ‘What If…?’game until I came up with a plausible reason for him working in the park. Once I came up him as my hero Joe, and my setting of Broome, the heroine, title, and outline of the plot soon followed.

3. How did you develop the chemistry between your main characters?

I knew roughly how I wanted to get the book from the start to the finish, but, once they met in the book, the characters virtually took over. Some mornings I couldn’t wait to get up and onto the computer to see how they resolved differences or moved their relationship and the story forward.

Although my novels have no graphic sex, the chemistry must have been there as one of my readers wrote, “Just as well…[for the ending] as the sexual tension had built up unbearably!!”

4. What was your journey to publication like?

As a child of eight, with the strong support of my father, I sent off recycled jokes, short articles and competition entries to children’s clubs in national newspapers and magazines. Then I graduated to writing features and making up crossword puzzles for school publications.

Torn between becoming a writer or a teacher, I became a secondary Humanities teacher. When I took time out to have a family, I wrote and sold puzzles to newspapers and educational and children’s magazines. This led to my compiling activity books and educational puzzle books. I also did a journalism course and wrote travel articles for magazines and newspapers. This led to a travel book. My husband, Hartley, who did the photos and mudmaps, was also my advisor on flora and fauna.

Because I write in various fields and wanted to write for a living, I concentrated on writing for where I could find markets. To add to my Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education plus experience in secondary teaching and to help me hone my skills further, I did a variety of courses, including a Diploma of Arts (Professional Writing and Editing).

The publishers who accepted my first black-line masters book of educational puzzles and my first picture storybook took the books to camera-ready stage, but were taken over and broke our contacts. As compensation they gave me the camera-ready material. I found a publisher to take the puzzles book, but he did not have a place for the picture book. So I set up my own publishing house and published it and subsequently published several more books.

Later I made up workbooks for primary students for an educational publisher.

Over some years I had also been writing and rewriting novels. Several top editors gave me the encouragement and feedback I needed, and one recommended to her publisher they publish Broome Enigma my debut novel.

5. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Do a writing course, if possible a tertiary Diploma in Arts (Professional Writing and Editing). You will learn such a lot about dos and don’ts, it will save much learning by trial and error. The assignments, the passion of the tutors and other students, and the critiques of your and other students’ work are invaluable. Short courses are also of value.

Network with other writers; join writers’ groups; join a critique group; attend writing courses and festivals.

Get published regularly by writing shorter pieces, such as short stories, articles and poems. Getting published builds up your reputation as a writer and gives you credits for your resume. In the short term, it also helps keeps you focused on becoming and developing as a writer. It is also a source of writer satisfaction.

Read Mary Buckham’s A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting and Janice Hardy’s Understanding Show, Don’t Tell to help you show rather than tell in your writing.

6. How do you deal with criticism or negative reviews?

I love feedback on my work, especially when it is constructive and courteously-worded. Virtually all reviewers of Broome Enigma have given positive reviews, though several made critical comments, usually worded courteously. Several have given helpful comments that I have since taken on board when writing and revising novels and other material, and I am grateful to them. Sadly, several didn’t like ‘that sort of book’, and you just have to accept that. Sometimes though, criticism cuts like a knife, especially if it comes from someone you like and whose work you admire. On those occasions, I go off and return to the comment later when my immediate response has simmered down. Then I reread it to see if the criticism has substance. If it does, I use it to improve my work.

7. Which books or authors have influenced you the most?

Jane Austen, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Mavis Thorpe Clarke, Catherine Cookson, Bryce Courtenay, Charles Dickens, Albert Facey for A Fortunate Life, Richard Flanagan, Catherine Gaskin, Kate Grenville, Ernest Hemingway, Victoria Holt, Elizabeth Kata for A Patch of Blue, Victor Kelleher for Taronga, Thomas Keneally, Henry Lawson, John Marsden, Somerset Maugham, Colleen McCullough, Robert C. O’Brien for Z for Zachariah, Ruth Park, Danielle Steel, John Steinbeck, E.V.Timms, and many more.

8. What are you working on next?

I am reworking a novel about a single mum with a six-month-old baby who goes to live in a regional coastal village in south-eastern Australia in 1987.  Like her, her next-door neighbor, an attractive young man, has been hurt in love. Over time, shared interests and values, and the baby, help resolve conflicts and barriers to the attraction that grows between them.

9. How do you see the publishing industry changing in the next few years?

While some of us might prefer to read print books, e-books are cheaper to produce and transport to readers. Because of e-books, people who might never have been published are now published authors. To some extent, I think both writers and readers have to move with the times or get left behind.

However, the development of A1 and the lack of respect for the rights of authors whose books have been pirated is horrific. See eg Authors Guild Member David Baldacci Testifies Before Senate Crime Subcommittee on AI Theft – The Authors Guild and Download File: 2025-07-16 – Testimony – Baldacci.pdf | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Hopefully, we are not witnessing the death of creative thought with A1 taking over the writing of books.

10. What do you hope your legacy as a writer will be?

A reader wrote, “There are thousands of people, like me, who LOVE your writing and whose worlds are a better place because you are contributing to them. On behalf of that loyal community, thank you!!!! …from the depths of my/our heart/s.”

Being worthy of this comment is what I aspire to.

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I hope you loved getting to know Meryl Brown Tobin and hearing about her journey, her inspirations, and her

swoon-worthy novel, Broome Enigma. If you haven’t added this to your TBR yet, now’s the time—trust me, you won’t want to miss it. 💖

You can connect with Meryl Brown Tobin here:
📚 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/merylbrowntobin-author

📱 Socials: https://www.facebook.com/meryl.tobin.18
https://amazon.com/author/meryl-brown-tobin23
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6422807.Meryl_Brown_Tobin

🛒 Grab her books: Amazon US | Amazon AU

Thank you for joining me in spotlighting a fellow romance lover who’s giving us all the feels. Stay tuned for more author features, book talk, and behind-the-scenes romance goodness.

Until next time—keep reading, keep swooning! ✨📚