AustLit

'The boys from back home stand beside the bed, watching her bleed onto the white sheet. 'He only said to scare her,' one of them says.

'Sidney is happily married to her firefighter husband and thinking about having a child, but her life has been marred by psychotic breakdowns. Haunted by memories of Dean Cola - the teenage crush who is an essential piece of the puzzle that is her past - she returns to the town where she grew up. Something unthinkable happened there, but is she strong enough to face it?

'A compelling portrait of mental illness, memory, and the ways that the years when we 'come of age' can be twisted into trauma.' (Publication summary)

When Brigitte and her family moved from the city, they were supposed to be happier. And safer. But soon her crime-writer ex-boyfriend turns up in town to promote his new novel, in which a woman is found dead - murdered - in a country lake. Hours later, Brigitte watches the police pull a body from the water near her Gippsland home. Her husband, a country cop now, is at the scene, though it's not his investigation; he's only helping the Melbourne Homicide Squad. But there's something he's not telling Brigitte. With her personal life spiralling out of control once more, and fearing her family is in danger, who can Brigitte turn to? And what if she makes the wrong choice? Dead in the Water is about trying to escape the cycle of trauma. It delves into the darkness beneath the surface of fear, betrayal, and revenge, to find a glimmer of hope.

Source: Publisher's blurb

'Is Brigitte a loving wife and mother, or a cold-blooded killer?

Nobody knows why she was in the east of the city so early on the morning she was left for dead by a hit-and-run driver. It was the Friday before Christmas 1994 - the same day police discovered the body of a man beaten to death in her apartment.

Fourteen years later, Brigitte is married to the detective who investigated the murder, which she claims to have lost her memory of in the car accident. They have young twins, and seem to be a happy family. Until the reopening of the cold case.

Please Don't Leave Me Here is about loss, love and lies. It is about pain, fear, and memory. And, above all, it is about letting go.' (Scribe)