Under The Cold Bright Lights

Description

The gripping new standalone mystery from one of Australia's most celebrated crime writers, longlisted for the 2018 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel The young detectives call Alan Auhl a retread, but that doesn't faze him. He does things his own way-and gets results. He still lives with his ex-wife, off and on, in a big house full of random boarders and hard-luck stories. And he's still a cop, even though he retired from Homicide some years ago. He works cold cases now. Like the death of John Elphick-his daughters still convinced he was murdered, the coroner not so sure. Or the skeleton that's just been found under a concrete slab. Or the doctor who killed two wives and a girlfriend, and left no evidence at all. Auhl will stick with these cases until justice is done. One way or another.

Garry Disher has published fifty titles-fiction, children's books, anthologies, textbooks, the Wyatt thrillers and the Peninsula Crimes series. His previous standalone novel, Bitter Wash Road, won the German Crime Prize in 2016.

`Victorian crime fiction king Garry Disher is a literary machine...Bring on the next case.' * Herald Sun * `Well-crafted and leanly written, this tense novel grips from beginning to end.' * Canberra Weekly * `There are many twists to a tale that opens with one of those closely observed vignettes of outer suburban life that Disher does so well...It's a riveting opening scene, setting in motion just one of the cases with which the amiable Auhl will deal in the most cathartic of ways.' * Age * `Garry Disher has been giving us highly intelligent literary thrillers for decades and he gets better and better.' * Australian * `Under the Cold Bright Lights is a gripping page-turner of a book with a truly likable hero. Auhl must wrestle with his own morality as he faces a flawed system that threatens to allow for more harm than it prevents. Award-winning author Garry Disher expertly weaves together Auhl's different cases and dilemmas to create an authentically Australian standalone police procedural with a memorably different kind of protagonist-one I'm hoping will be able to take his big heart and keen sense of empathy to more crime novels in the future.' * Criminal Element * `Australian Master Garry Disher is one of the best contemporary crime authors because he manages to turn a solution into a mystery... If Karl Kraus is right with his assertion that only he who can turn a solution into a mystery is a real artist, then there can be no doubt about Disher's artistry.' * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *