Dim's Write Stuff

Fans of Tristan Bancks’ pacy action-orientated middle grade novels will be lunging for his latest serving of thrills and spills, Cop & Robber . The incongruous grouping of nouns as a title was enough to whet my appetite but the opening paragraph literally haunted me for days in a ‘this feels so real, must keep reading’ kinda way. Bancks is master at creating authentic suspense with a mere sprinkling of words, teasing the reader in like an experienced fly fisherman. And chapter one certainly hooks. Nash witnesses his dad, commit a robbery from the local Broken Ridge service station. It’s not the smoothest of criminal operations and yields very little if you don’t count the mounting dread and colossal sense of shame that chokes Nash. He knows his dad, Lyle is a decent sort of bloke deep down, the type who models himself on historic bushrangers with a will to stand up for the little guy. Dad is an ex-boxing champ with no other bankable skills other than an urge to rob banks to make