Just Like the Night by Michael Caleb Tasker

Just Like the Night is the debut novel from Michael Caleb Tasker, a Canadian-born writer who has lived in Australia for about twenty years and is now based in Adelaide. It is lean, literary crime, closer to noir than to the standard thriller.

Sera Olin is out on parole after more than eight years inside. As a child, her charismatic father taught her the life: cons, fixed card games, always moving, first across America and then to Australia, where they were meant to go straight. Now Sera wants one thing, to see her estranged daughter Lena. But Lena is grown, and mixed up with people far more dangerous than Sera realises, and staying clear of it turns out not to be a choice she gets to make.

Set in the hard edges of Sydney, it is a spare, gripping story about family, conscience and how far a mother will go. For readers of Mark Brandi and Garry Disher.

'Lean, exacting prose with teeth. A belter.' Robert Lukins, author of Loveland

'A propulsive, searing portrayal of one woman's desperate attempt to turn her life around.' Mark Brandi, author of Wimmera