Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Cold Truth
By Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Ultimo Press
2025, ISBN: 978-1-76115-169-9, Jan 2025
I first encountered Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s writing in the very funny How to be Australian, a book that, as a migrant myself, resonated, often reducing me to laughter. Dark Mode was a change of pace: a powerful and terrifying novel that was so engaging I skipped a party to finish it. Cold Truth is even more engaging. I read this book in just over a day, pushing back other commitments because I couldn’t bear to stop. The book is full of suspense which Kalagian Blunt creates in all sorts of ways. The most notable is her terrific characterisation. The main protagonist, Harlow, drives the narrative forward with just the right combination of intellectual acumen, warmth and anxiety. The reader becomes invested in Harlow and her desperate search for her missing father Scott. Harlow runs a successful local tour company called “Secrets of Winnipeg” and has a weekly segment on the news, along with a massive Instagram following. She knows the area well, including its quirky secrets, and it’s clear that Kalagian Blunt does too as we travel around the city. Cold Truth is rich with all sorts of delightful details about Winnipeg from a range of distinctive foods like “Mooseheads”, “nips and chips”, Tim Horton’s “double double”, and coffee crisps, as well as historical facts and architectural oddities, ornate brickwork, and cast-iron columns:
Winnipeg was considered Canada’s most haunted city. In the early 1900s, local doctor Thomas Glendenning Hamilton became known for hosting seances in his home with Ouija board demonstrations and table tippings. Arthur Conan Doyle even travelled to Manitoba to attend one of his seances.
The plot twists are roller-coaster-like, with each chapter bringing in a new possible suspect for the Scott’s disappearance. Harley’s growing exhaustion coupled with a cliffhanger every couple of minutes makes for a superfast pace, and I found it impossible to guess what would happen next.
Cold is a constant. Each chapter begins with the day, date and temperature, which ranges from glacial to freezing, the temperature dropping from a balmy -10 to a deadly -46 (“Colder than the surface of Mars”). Death by freezing, falling, or careening across ice is an ever-present possibility right from the opening:
Driving in the storm was a mistake. Snow pummelled the windshield and polished the highway to sheer ice.
Throughout the book, ice shards pelt, arctic wind gusts, and banks of snow are everywhere, even building up in hallway corridors. The snow provides a range of obstacles that add to the grisly fun of the book. There is even a snow maze, which Google assures me is real.
Another constant is the tense relationship between Harlow and her sister Blaise, who provides some comic relief with her perfect bun and full makeup, negative energy clearing crystals, her ever-present yapping Pomeranian Caesar, and the SlimCaffe pyramid scheme she keeps trying to convince Harlow to sign up to. There are all sorts of sisterly irritations between the two as they search together for their missing father, unfurling some deep seated history between the two against the tension of the present crisis:
Sisters are like blisters. You can’t forget they’re there, and sometimes they hurt you, but you can’t pop them to make them go away. They’re part of you, so you have to live with them.
We never get Blaise’s perspective so she remains a caricature through most of the book, but she provides an important counterpoint to Harlow’s deep sincerity and desperation to find her father, while also adding to the suspense of the book. Another technique that works beautifully with Harley is the revelation of her unspoken thoughts which recur, adding backstory and an important link to unresolved business – another thread that runs through the book.
If I’d been home, I could have saved mum.
Red leather straps. Lollipop tattoo. Suck me,
Antagonists like the “Tall man” and “Grizz” add additional comedy with their bumbling antics, along with Blaise’s boyfriend Jax, an IT whizz who is suspiciously familiar with all of the latest hacking techniques. This is important because as with Dark Mode, cyber crime features throughout this book. The dark web also makes a reappearance, and although there is plenty of light relief throughout the book against the mystery and frenetic pace, the way that Cold Truth shows how easily the internet can blur what we perceive to be real or can function as a tool for nefarious means is chilling.
Cold Truth is an edge-of-the-seat read that is both intense and scary, partly because of what it reveals about our society. While the book is, in many ways, as scary as Dark Mode, it’s clear that Kalagian Blunt had a lot of fun writing this and it makes for an enjoyable read that will appeal to a very wide range of readers.