Maguire had always read true crime but was increasingly bothered by the representation of the victim in crime fiction. She didn't want to know about the suffering of the detectives. She wanted to learn about the victims, and what their death meant to the people who loved them.

It reached tipping point one day when she was watching the television crime drama True Detective.

Episode one begins with the discovery of a young prostitute, found dead in a burned sugarcane field with a crown of antlers. The way in which this murder comes to haunt the two detectives assigned to the case is the premise for the entire first season.

"It's a perfectly legitimate story to tell but I just found myself thinking, 'I don't care what's haunted [the detectives]'," Maguire says. "I want to know about the woman and the people who loved her most. If I think about all the women I know – and I know a lot of women – every single one of them, if it happened to them, it would just rip a hole in everyone who knew them."

An Isolated Incident is Maguire's attempt to right that wrong, tracing the ripple effects of a senseless murder of a young girl on her sister and the truck-stop rural township in which they live.

In her non-fiction, criticisms and essays Maguire has long written about the endless ideological battles of gender in which she argues young women's thoughts, bodies and actions are controlled and policed at every turn.

An Isolated Incident draws out the tension between the personal and collective anxieties around women's sexuality via the murder of a "good woman" and a murder hunt played out in the media spotlight.

Bella Michaels is the perfect poster woman for murder. She is blonde, a nurse, beloved by co-workers; Miss Popularity, as her devastated sister Chris observes. Chris, by contrast, is a barmaid of disrepute, a divorcee who wags her tits at men in the pub where she works and takes the occasional man home for paid sex.

As police puzzle over Bella's killer, Maguire complicates the private picture of both women while never losing sight of the enormity of the human tragedy.

"The classic easier narrative of violence against women is that it is a stranger in the night, or in the day even, grabbing them and dragging them off," Maguire says.

"When it comes to women who are more like 'us' or what most people like to think of themselves as, I think there is a tendency to care about those murders more. They are bigger media stories but still, quite quickly into the cycle, the question is asked, 'What was she doing?"'

Women, says Maguire, can be just as adept at victim-blaming as men.

"It's certainly a problem that's very much rooted in gender roles and expectations of gender. Girls grow up in the same society as men do and take on a lot of those same messages."

The title An Isolated Incident comes from Maguire's frustration that newsworthy individual tragedies are rarely linked to recognise the pattern of male violence against women.

In the middle of the book's writing, Maguire researched domestic violence homicides for the human rights magazine, Right Now.The many murder trial court transcripts she read fed directly into the book as did the kind of outrage that drives the feminist online campaign of counting women killed by their partners.

The 1986 killing of Anita Cobby, a death which happened close to her western Sydney neighbourhood, also shadows the novel in spirit if not in actual detail.

"As a girl growing up at the at time in Sydney that's probably the first news case I remember being very aware of, that I wanted to follow, and my parents telling me 'No', and turning things off,'' Maguire says.  Her older sister was at Blacktown station changing buses to school every day while the trial of the killers was making daily headline news and all the horrific details were being discussed everywhere. "

It was important to Maguire, however, that she not borrow from real life tragedy. Unlike most crime fiction, the book contains no gratuitous details of violence. Maguire didn't want to participate in the lurid spectacle of crime as entertainment, though there is space enough, she admits, between the lines for the reader's own imagination or knowledge of real life events to "jump in there".

Maguire is speaking in a tiny upstairs room in the NSW Writer's Centre, a bolt hole in redolent parkland to which she retreats when her inner west apartment becomes too claustrophobic. She teaches contemporary fiction writing here Wednesday nights, and she is a popular speaker.

"What this novel doesn't do and I never wanted it to do was to be any kind of police procedural or unpicking of the mystery of what happened because it was always going to be a novel about the aftermath of a murder. It was always going to be about how someone lives with an unnatural death," Maguire says.

"When I felt myself getting confused and unclear in the writing it was a touchstone that I came back to, that there's to be no solving because there can be no resolution.

"It is the difference between an individual story and a societal reality – that when one person is arrested for a terrible crime, crimes against women don't stop. There's no closure."

The opening paragraph featuring the dreaded policeman's knock at the door was the first Maguire wrote for the book and, unusually, survived the editing process. The rest of the novel came slowly over four or more years as she took great care with its narrative weight, and introduced the secondary character of May, a novice online journalist. The final draft was written alone in Paris on a Nancy Keesing Fellowship which ended in January 2015.

Sisters seem to be a theme of hers. Maguire has two, as well as a brother, and they are close. "My sisters are the loves of my life in a way so that's an easy place for  me to go in terms of love that is not romantic love, it's also a very complicated love to talk about."

The voice of Chris, Maguire says, came to her very early in the writing process.

"I feel like she's someone I would know, who I went to school with, who I could actually have been if I made a few different choices here or there or not been lucky here or there.

"There's definitely a point in my early 20s I felt that was going to be my life, working those kind of jobs, and that would have been OK, that didn't feel like a particular tragedy. It was only really the drive to write that pushed me out of that. If I hadn't had that, or it hadn't worked, if I had written something and nothing had come of it, I don't see my life would be particularly different."

Maguire was the primary school prefect and library monitor who became a wild child in adolescence, and quit her Sydney selective high school in year 9 by "mutual agreement".

"I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to be learning at that stage which later made me very sad when I became incredibly hungry to learn as an adult," she says. "I was so interested in boys, and chasing boys; that seemed much more important than anything else. I was mindlessly rebellious. Give me a rule and I [wouldn't] do it because it was a rule."

Maguire spent another two years at her local high school before dropping out completely.

"I worked bar jobs, I worked at McDonald's for years, I did waitressing before I decided to get my shit together and go back to study as a mature age student and start writing seriously," she said.

Taming the Beast, the debut novel Maguire started when she was 23, made her name. An explicit, sexually violent, dark tale of the consequences that follow the seduction of a 14-year-old by her 38-year-old English teacher, the bestseller set the tone for the four books that would follow, each of them delving into the dark side of female-male relationships.

The Gospel According to Luke looks at morally contested questions of rape and abortion in the relationship between a religious zealot and a sexual health counsellor while Smoke in the Room explores depression, suicide, mental illness and sex-as-balm through the grim and grimy world of three flatmates. Fishing for Tigers, written while on an Asialink fellowship in Vietnam, follows an illicit sexual tryst between an older woman and a teenager.

Next year Maguire, 39, will be married to Jeff, her teenage sweetheart for 20 years. A favourite dinnertime pastime of her many teenage nieces and nephews is to ask Maguire's parents and siblings for stories of her hell-raising teenage exploits.

''They enjoy it a lot because I don't seem as rebellious now. I'm now their old auntie who looks after them.''

Why does sex figure so prominently in her writing? "I don't know", she shrugs. Then starts again. It is such an impolite topic and yet intrudes into public life time and time again. "How many sex scandals do we have to have with senior politicians?" she asks. ''We joke and think, 'Why is he thinking with his dick?'. These can be people who are so controlled in every other aspect of their life. It can be this incredibly powerful force, but everyone walks around pretending it's not there."

An Isolated Incident is published by Picador Australia at $32.99.

And Another Thing: Maguire's favourite novel is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. She returns to it whenever she becomes stuck for words.