The document summarizes the plot and details of the romantic suspense novel "As Darkness Falls" by Bronwyn Parry. Former small-town police officer Isabelle O'Connell is called back to investigate the abduction of a child in her hometown. She works with city cop Alec Goddard to find the girl within days before the killer targets Isabelle. Their investigation is complicated by the isolation of the rural setting and their attraction to each other, which the killer exploits.

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3.  Title: As Darkness Falls (Dungirri #1)
 Author: Bronwyn Parry
 Publisher: Hachette Australia/Piatkus Books
(UK)
 Publication Date: 1st September 2008
 Paperback: 360 pages
 Genre: Romantic Suspense
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4.  Isabella O'Connell used to be a small-town
cop in outback New South Wales.
 She was also a good detective, and she knew
it.
 Until a child was murdered, and she never
found the killer.
 Now the nightmare is happening again.
 Can she return to her home town with city
cop Alec Goddard?
 Or should she tell him to get lost?
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5.  As Darkness Falls is set in the isolation of a small
town on the edge of the New South Wales
outback. Haunted by her failures, country police
officer Detective Isabelle O'Connell is recalled to
duty by Detective Alec Goddard to investigate the
abduction of yet another child from her old home
town.
 With the killer playing a game of cat and mouse
and targeting Bella, they have only days in which
to find the girl alive, but they have very few clues,
a whole town of suspects, and a vast wilderness
to search.
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6.  For Bella, this case is already personal; for
Alec his best intentions to keep it purely
professional soon dissolve.
 He starts to think of the missing child as if
she were his own, and his anguish over
Bella’s safety moves beyond the just his
concern for a colleague.
 Their mutual attraction leaves them both
vulnerable to their private nightmares –
nightmares that the killer ruthlessly exploits.
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7.  Complex Characters;
 Sizzling Romance;
 Snappy Dialogue;
 An Interesting Setting;
 A clever murder mystery;
 Full of shocks, gunshots, explosions,
suspense and the occasional mildly
simmering love scene.
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8.  She grew up surrounded by books, and have
a love of reading stories, commercial fiction,
literary fiction, children’s literature, history.
 Academically, She is particularly interested in
story-telling and readership in popular
fiction, and she is currently undertaking a
part-time PhD, researching online
communities of romance readers and writers
and their perspectives on the genre.
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9.  She is a member of the Romance Writers of
Australia and the Romance Writers of
America, and in July 2007 she was honoured
to win the prestigious Golden Heart Award for
the romantic suspense manuscript.
 She live on 100 acres of beautiful bushland in
the New England tablelands. While she’ve
lived in cities and enjoy the cafes and
bookshops, she love the naturalness and the
rich complexity of the bush.
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10.  A difficult setting, and a difficult task for the
debut novelist.
 Bronwyn Parry does a fine job with bringing a
small Australian bush town to life and this is
the great strength of the read.
 You can taste the dust in the air and truly
really picture everyone talking out the sides
of their mouths (so thus to avoid the
blowflies).
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11.  Where it would be a stretch is in calling this a
crime novel, or even one of romantic
suspense as there is no real mystery to solve
or any pretense in constructing one.
 As a developing relationship drama it serves
very well, and will draw the reader in with
their concerns for the couple of the hour and
allows time to mourn the passing of small
town trust.
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12.  The unsettling and claustrophobic feeling of
isolation and fear carries the reader from
chapter to chapter, giving the reader a taste
of the "closed room" or "apartment building"
drama as the characters are all introduced
relatively early in the piece and there is no
chance any unseen characters will come into
play due to the geographic restrictions of the
setting.
 It also makes it slightly ridiculous that for
example someone could fire off a shot in a
main street unseen, or that a police
investigation could be conducted at such a
lackadaisical pace.
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13.  If we don't concern ourselves with such
things, the read is more than able to be
enjoyed being that a novel set in the
Australian outback is a rare find, and Parry
makes excellent use of both landscape and
cast in her economically styled narrative.
 There are small cultural anomalies here and
there, probably for the American market ie
truck rather that ute or utility etc but they are
not a huge detraction.
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