Under the Cold Bright Lights
Garry Disher
Alan Auhl has come out of retirement to look into cold cases. He’s got himself a flock of needy cases at home, and is bound to run into some more at work. With a soft heart but an inability to express himself, will Auhl be able to see justice done?
Ugh, I spent this novel reading it in a sort of daze of disbelief. To start with, I didn’t really connect with the main character, and the style of writing just didn’t take me into the novel. And then, funnily enough, the protagonist talks about reading a book with no discernable plot-line. This one was just the same!
It’s nice to have a home-grown novel, for once I actually know the distances between the places that are mentioned. By the end of the novel though, I started running out of room in my head for place names and everything.
I find it hard to believe that a psychological expert could still make such statements about child sexual abuse being ‘made up’ by the child. Children rarely make things up as serious as that – unless they have been subjected to it, they probably don’t know even what it means to be sexually abused. That’s why it’s important to teach children the real names of genitals and so forth.
Is this the sort of novel that needs a sequel? I’m not really sure. All I can tell is that Alan honestly doesn’t seem to have much to live for, or much of a drive for life, and so he doesn’t care about how the ‘right’ outcome occurs. I’m giving this 2 begrudging stars. I felt like I had to finish it because I requested it, but honestly I shouldn’t have wasted my time.
Text Publishing | 30th October 2017 | AU $29.99 | paperback
Isn’t it a bit see-through that the main character falls for a guy totally outside the range of ‘norm’? For some reason, the ‘bad guys’ and the ‘wild guys’ always attract women. The heart wants what it can’t have? Anyway, it was totally predictable for who Paige would end up with, which made it a little more boring.
This novel was satisfyingly sneaky. The reader just keeps waiting for the penny to drop – and it never does! There’s hints of things that are awry, but I found myself always expecting one of the five suspects to make a mistake. It’s told from their point of views, but many other novels can successfully hide secrets from the reader by suppressing the thoughts of the character (such as in 
The novel opens with a boy picking berries to sell. l made an instant connection with him – that I gradually lost as the novel progressed. The other protagonist, the drone pilot, I absolutely understood, but again, I didn’t care about him either. This novel overall felt flat to me, just like the 2D characters.
This novel was engaging, powerful and awesome! I’m not sure that it was quite on the same level as 
I loved this novel so much. I loved 
At the age of 12, Helena meets the outside world for the first time but finds herself in a place that seems to have aged over 50 years over night. She doesn’t know what to do with any of the rules, and struggles to fit into anything, not helped by her grandparents spending all the money left over from her ‘telling her story’ to magazines. When she finds a man who appreciates her, she is too afraid to tell her past.
I wanted to love this novel. I was super excited about it from the moment that Ford Street emailed me to ask my opinion on which of three potential cover images would be the best. Turns out, the one I liked the most was also the one eventually chosen. I just found that this novel added very little to the host of teenage fiction around ‘fat girls’ and so forth. There’s several others that I have read, of which I just can’t remember the name of at the moment, and those would take my fancy first.
This is Conway’s greatest literary achievement so far. This novel made me keep reading it, and the range of characters was diverse. I have to say that I didn’t see most of the novel coming! Ah, twisty good bits. It’s amazing what secrets people can keep – and how awesome it is to set up a clue-finding trail. I only wish he had been there to see it!
Decker reminds me of a male