Sydney Bauer was born in the late sixties, her father a theatre manager and film promoter, her mother a fashion model and home maker.
Inspired by her father’s love of film and television and her mother’s sense of style, Sydney sought an early interest in media and writing and by her late teens was spending her nights studying a degree in Communications and her days making coffees as a copy girl at a major Sydney metropolitan daily.
By the late eighties she had secured a cadetship, and before long found herself covering the crime, legal and court rounds - moving around the country as a correspondent and learning the art of reporting real life drama on a deadline.
With the grit came a desire for the glamour, an interest initially fulfilled by the position of features editor on a major Australian magazine for young women, until the early nineties, when Sydney accepted her first position in television and found the commercial medium addictive.
She began as a junior publicist at Network Ten, and within four years was appointed National Network Director of Publicity whilst still in her twenties. In the late nineties she moved to the Seven Network to become Sydney Director of Programming.
“It was a gift,” says Sydney. “I literally loved what I did, and did what I loved 24 hours a day.
“The big treat was traveling to LA, meeting some of the best TV writers in the world, and watching them make these mini-movies on amazing studio sets week after week, season after season.
“It was like witnessing the creation of miniature pieces of art, which were, and still are, viewed by hundreds of millions of people, all over the world, every single day.”
It was the writing talents of these scriptwriters, and an admiration for authors such as Lee Child, David Baldacci, Dennis Lehane, John Grisham, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais and Richard North Patterson, that inspired Sydney to put pen to paper and start her own franchise - in the form of a series of novels featuring Boston based criminal attorney, David Cavanaugh.
Thanks to the encouragement and support of Pan Macmillan Deputy Publisher Cate Paterson, David and his friends became a publishing reality in UNDERTOW – and will feature in further adventures in the next two David Cavanaugh novels - GOSPEL and ALIBI.