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    Ghost Girls
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    Ghost Girls
    Unavailable
    Ghost Girls
    Ebook299 pages4 hours

    Ghost Girls

    By Cath Ferla

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winter in Sydney. The city is brimming with foreign students. Sophie Sandilands takes a job teaching at an English language school. When one of her students leaps to her death it becomes clear that lurking within the psyche of this community is a deep sense of despair and alienation. When it is revealed that the dead woman on the pavement has stolen another’s identity, Sophie is drawn into the mystery.Unable to resist the investigative instincts that run in her blood, Sophie finds herself unravelling a sinister operation that is trawling the foreign student market for its victims. But as Sophie works on tracking down the criminals it becomes evident that someone has knowledge of her and the disappearances in her own past. Will Sophie solve the mystery before she too becomes a ghost?Ghost Girls richly evokes the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of Sydney’s Chinatown, and imagines dark exploitative demands behind closed suburban doors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEcho Publishing
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9781760401184
    Unavailable
    Ghost Girls
    Author

    Cath Ferla

    CATH FERLA is a Melbourne-based writer with a background in screenwriting and script editing, educational publishing and arts writing. Also a trained teacher, Cath has taught English as an Acquired Language (EAL) in Melbourne, Sydney and Beijing. She has a keen interest in regional Chinese food and once took a solo food pilgrimage to China’s Sichuan province. Ginger, chilli and garlic are her favourite flavours.

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    Reviews for Ghost Girls

    4/5

    9 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Cath Ferla comes with a decent ouevre and (what looks like) an all-girl production team. Ghost Girls is part-thriller, part-adventure and part-detective. It's an enjoyable read, best taken in just a few sittings because there's a bunch of characters to follow. The plot is not complicated but there are enough little twists to keep you wondering, especially one near the end (well done, Cath!). Some of the encounters between characters might have more to do with plot mechanics than believability, but the coincidences are too few to be grating. The story is set in Sydney's Chinatown and Cath writes with the authority of someone who's been there, and in China. She deals with sexual exploitation of young women with an unsensational ethic. I'll look for more by Cath Ferla.
    • 4/5
      GHOST GIRLS took me into a world that I really hadn't thought too much about - English language students who come to Australia, mainly from China. Many of them come with high expectations, not much money, and very homesick. I probably knew all that. But the book gives the reader a "behind the scenes" look at the sleazy Sydney underworld that preys on these students, and just how vulnerable they are.Sophie Sandilands is part Chinese herself, brought back to the "safety" of Australia from China by her Australian father. But even then her Chinese mother disappeared and Sophie has never forgiven her father, a private investigator, for the role that he played in that.One of the themes of the book is disappearance: David, the young boy who disappeared in a playground in Beijing while Sophie was caring for him, girls who seem to disappear without trace from the English language classes in the school where Sophie teaches. And underneath all an underworld that deals in pornography, prostitution and drug distribution.An intriguing read.
    • 5/5
      Sophie, half Irish and half Chinese, daughter of an erstwhile Australian PI and a missing Chinese mother teaches English as a second language in Sidney. When she looks for one of her favorite students signed up for a new semester, she sees the student’s name but not the face. Then a student jumps to her death; again name and face don’t match. This leads her on a dangerous journey through the underbelly of sex crimes and organized prostitution. Young Chinese girls are recruited from China to study English for university classes but end up as slaves to the underworld. As Sophie pieces together her clues we journey through the savory smells of Chinese cooking and the not so savory odor of death. This is a remarkably close-knit piece of fiction, keeping your interest to the very end with plenty of action and mystery. I received an electronic copy in return for an honest review.