After portraying the mega-wealthy life of a media tycoon’s daughter in Succession, Australian actor Sarah Snook has locked in her next heavyweight TV series with a suburban thriller.

Snook plays a mother whose child disappears following an after-school play date in the series, which is adapted from the 2021 Irish Times bestseller All Her Fault.

For the Dublin-based author, Andrea Mara, who started penning crime novels after leaving her full-time job in 2015, discovering Snook was to play her lead character made her day.

“I wish I had a picture of my face when I heard this news, but safe to say, there was a scream,” she wrote on X.

Also coming on as executive producer, Snook has previously lamented the end of Succession after its final episode went to air in May last year.

“It’s hard to express what this show has meant to me,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

“The places I got to go, the immense talent I got to work with … it breaks my heart that it is all over … we all set the bar high for each other, then exceeded it and excelled, in every department.”

Snook said the critically lauded show was a “career highlight, which will no doubt be hard to top”.

Mara’s book fandom expressed delight and excitement at the news of Snook’s casting.

Many said Snook will be perfect for the role.

‘A wonderfully twisty nightmare’

Snook, who shares a daughter with husband and Melbourne comedian Dave Lawson, will play mother Marissa Irvine in the upcoming Peacock series.

“It opens on a plausibly terrifying situation that eventually unearths the deep secrets of a community,” writes Deadline.

According to Penguin Random House, the plot line is that Irvine arrives at “14 Tudor Grove, expecting to pick up her young son Milo from his first playdate with a boy at his new school”.

“But the woman who answers the door isn’t a mother she recognises. She isn’t the nanny. She doesn’t have Milo. And so begins every parent’s worst nightmare.”

As news of the disappearance filters through the quiet Dublin suburb and an unexpected suspect is named, whispers start to spread about the women most closely connected to the shocking event.

The question asked is did just one person take Milo, or are all the women in the story involved?

In her blog, Mara reveals she wrote the first draft of All Her Fault “at a corner of my dad’s dining room table – writing furiously to get the words down while my kids were at school each morning”.

She told Irish celebrity website VIP she loved writing All Her Fault, especially the “school-gate Coven who spend their time making snide, passive aggressive comments about everyone else”.

“I’ve often heard people talking about school-gate dramas and competitiveness but I’ve never experienced it in real life. So I enjoyed inventing it for the book and writing characters that readers love to hate.”

Snook alongside Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong in Succession. Photo: YouTube/HBO

In the 12 months since the last episode of the fourth and final season of Succession wrapped in May, Snook has shot multiple films including Australian psychological thriller, Run Rabbit Run.

She’s also voiced an animation with Adam Elliot, Memoir of a Snail, and shot a feature-length comedy drama with Zach Galifianakis, The Beanie Bubble.

She was most recently seen on stage at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket on The West End in the award-winning play The Picture of Dorian Gray.

She’s won two Golden Globes and an Emmy for her Succession role, and playing 26 characters over two hours in a play that resulted in her receiving the UK’s top prize, the Olivier Award, in April.

The play is scheduled for a Broadway season next year.