For most of her life, Estelle Thompson lived with her brother in her family's property at Nambour, in the Sunshine coast hinterland. She worked as a dairy farmer, where she drew most of her inspiration from. As she explained to The Australian Women's Weekly in 1963, 'I do all my thinking and plotting in the cowshed'.
Thompson wrote mainly in the crime and thriller genres, often incorporating elements of romance into her stories. Her novels are mostly set in the 1960s, in Brisbane or in small unspecified Queensland country towns. To Catch a Rainbow is the only of her novels to take place in a historical setting, in the Gympie goldfields in Queensland in the late 1860s.
