Dry Dock is Cathy Cole's first published novel and features a private investigator called Nicola Sharpe. Nicola is six feet tall, looks like Annie Lennox of the band, the Eurythmics and is fourth generation Balmain. Cathy started writing Dry Dock when she was living in Melbourne and homesick for Sydney. Balmain is a fascinating place full of contrasts and contradictions.Crime fiction wasn't Cathy's first foray into literature. She's had poetry and short stories published and won a writing fellowship to Varuna Writer's Centre to work on a novel. A year later the novel manuscript was commended in a national book award. But somehow the harbour and Balmain's narrow street's lent themselves very well to the crime genre, so crime it was.
