Light Sleeper

A Gritty Crime Novel Set in 1990s Sydney

Nineteen-year-old Jay Rouillon is content pouring drinks in a Kings Cross bar and dreaming of escape. But when his ambitious girlfriend, Edie, draws him into a fast-growing drug business, easy money gives way to dangerous clients, fractured loyalties, and violence he cannot control.

With a disgraced former cop supplying them and a corrupt detective ruling the streets through fear, Jay is pulled deeper into Sydney’s criminal underworld. As blood is spilled and his friend Ricky Angel is pushed toward destruction, Jay must decide whether he has what it takes to survive—or whether leaving will cost him everything.

Raw, tense, and unflinching, Light Sleeper is a gripping story of ambition, corruption, loyalty, and the price of breaking free.

Read Light Sleeper and enter the shadowy streets of 1990s Sydney.

Excerpt from the book

Edie and Jay were in the Kardomah Café, a rock venue on Bayswater Road in Kings Cross. The Painters and Dockers were playing, up from Melbourne for a few gigs. Jay had taken the night off from his bar job to come and see them play. He and Edie stood side by side on a table at the back of the room. They watched as Paulie Stewart, slightly overweight, pants slung low on his hips, hands behind his head as he thrusted his pelvis at the audience while he sang the words to Nude School. The mosh pit, stripping off, chanting the words back at the singer, pogo dancing. Someone hefted their friend up onto the stage, and he bounced around the band, who let the intruder do as he pleased. Paulie kept strutting and singing. The intruder eventually crashed back into the pit as the band played on and madness continued.

It was a hot Thursday night in December of 1990. There was no air-con. The smell of sweat and stale beer filled the room. A smoke haze hung over it. The venue was below street level, giving it a hip subterranean feel. Jay smoked and constantly looked around. He had the cash, but Edie’s friend with the weed and speed hadn’t shown up, and she said to him,

‘Jay, take it easy. Stop being so nervous. He’ll be here, don’t worry.’

She smiled at him. That and her words were enough to calm him. The band kept pumping out music. People were jammed in all over the place. The crowd sang and pulsed to the loud, wild music, Paulie singing like a man possessed. The Dockers’ live shows were legendary. Edie’s hip rubbed against Jay’s hip now and then. She was twenty-one, a fashion buyer at David Jones. Jay was nineteen. She slipped in behind him and put her arms around his waist. He, drunk, leaned back into her. Then Jay looked down from the table. Benny had appeared out of nowhere. Jay squatted on his haunches on the table, coming down to hear what Benny had to say,.

‘You got the cash?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Drop it in my bum bag, here.’

Jay stood up next to Edie and said,

‘He’s here.’

She looked and saw him, didn’t acknowledge his existence, but opened her large, dark blue tote bag, found the brown envelope, gave it to Jay, who climbed off the table and put the cash into Benny’s small bum bag.

‘Is it all there?’

‘Of course, what…’

Benny shoved a small backpack at him and said,

‘Here’s the gear.’

‘Thanks.’

No one noticed, and if they did, it meant nothing. Too much was happening in the crowd and on stage. Benny knew that, and he knew there was no CCTV. Benny was scary. A forty-year-old ex-cop who had been booted out for aggravated assault on a fellow officer. He had been best friends with Edie’s brother, Matt, who had died a year before from a drug overdose.