Viskic won the Davitt (named after Ellen Davitt, writer of Australia's first murder novel) for best novel, the best debut award (shared with Fleur Ferris' Risk), and the readers' choice award, while she won the Ned for best debut novel.

The awards represented multiple endorsements for a crucial creative decision she made after she had finished the first draft of the book that begins with her hero, Caleb Zelic, cradling the dead body of his best friend.

She figured something wasn't working with Zelic. He seemed the sort of character who had appeared in several earlier stories and she recognised him as something of an outsider. The question was why. Then she recognised some of his traits and quirks from a profoundly deaf girl she had known. That was it; her hero was deaf.

But writing a deaf character did not appeal. "I am a classical musician [Viskic has played the clarinet for the likes of Melbourne Opera and the Australian Pops Orchestra] so sound is the way I approach writing. A lot of people do the visual first, but I do dialogue and my early drafts are like a script. Also for the technical reason of how do I make this work, and the third reason was that I was really nervous about writing a caricature, a tokenistic character."

So Viskic had to retrospectively research her character's deafness and that involved learning Auslan. "He had to use Auslan with the people he loves because it's a way of him being comfortable and showing his relationships. That was a huge boon to me as a writer and wonderful to be introduced to this whole other world I barely knew existed."

She's not exactly fluent: "One of the characters, his ex-cop friend Frankie, probably has the same level of Auslan as me. She is unintentionally funny at times. I can hold a conversation – like a child."

If Viskic's success at the Davitts represents the emergence of a significant new Australian crime-writing talent, winning the Ned for best novel for Before it Breaks represents a return to the fold for Dave Warner. The last of his six previous crime novels, eXXXpresso,  appeared in 2000 since when the writer and musician has been working for the big and small screens.

"If you're doing feature films you can still find time to do novel writing, but with TV it was not possible; it's such an all-consuming beast. I had three years when I plotted virtually every episode of Rescue Special Ops and it's really draining."

But for one reason or another the television work dried up and Warner could return to crime fiction and making music – his band the Suburbs is recording its first album in 35 years – the two thing he loves most.

He said going back to fiction was as if he'd been playing badminton and someone had called him in to play tennis on a grass court.

"Three years on with no money changes the idea somewhat about what is a great idea or not. But it has freed me up again to pursue things much more creatively."

Gideon Haigh, better known for his many books about cricket, won the non-fiction Ned for his true-crime book, Certain Admissions. Alecia Simmonds won the non-fiction Davitt for Wildman.

sistersincrime.org.au; austcrimewriters.com