Trigger warnings: Abusive father, death of a mother from a car crash (in the past), near-death experience in a lake, death of a dog, death of a friend

6/10, after taking a break from Australian authors after the last one written by them underwhelmed me I was hoping that this was better and I was expecting more from an author's crime debut; sadly it wasn't due to the many glaring flaws in this, where do I begin and come on Australians, you can do better than that. I do wonder whether the books this author made after this would be better than this one. It begins with the main character Lucy Hart living in Digger's Landing in Queensland and she wants to get out of there as soon as possible, I can understand that because it's just a boring fishing town with nothing much to do there and everything looks fine but I keep noticing that when she sleeps she has a recurring dream of her swimming in the ocean and there was a sinking boy and she tries to save him but he sank, then she wakes up from that and goes on with her normal life but she feels like an outcast and I don't know why but it's probably the reason why my library put the book in the mystery rather than the realistic section. Somehow I couldn't connect to Lucy at all since she wasn't developed or fleshed out enough even when she was unpopular and I didn't like her abusive father but at least he developed his character towards the end. In the end, there was a character called Tom who died for whatever reason, it was hinted that Lucy's mother who was a dream walker like herself died in a car crash. It turns out that her father couldn't swim and this helped me understand her recurring dreams however her dog Glen died and her father almost did, wrapping up the book on a low note. ( )