Andrew Nette's Blog - Posts Tagged "ghost-money"
How I came to write Ghost Money
I started writing the book that eventually became my debut novel Ghost Money in 1996 when I worked for several months in Cambodia as a wire service journalist.
I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.
Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.
When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it. As it turned out, from a journalist’s standpoint, my timing was good.
Unknown to most foreign observers, the Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for many years. Partly this was the result of the government’s relentless military operations. More decisive were internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the spoils from the guerrillas’ logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.
In August 1996, a couple of weeks before I arrived, Ieng Sary, the former Deputy Prime Minister in the charnel house the Khmer Rouge called Democratic Kampuchea, announced he’d split from the movement and wanted to negotiate with the Coalition Government for amnesty.
He claimed he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered Sary was skimming the proceeds from gem mining and logging operations, and were about to move against him.
Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse that eventually resulted in open warfare between the two coalition partners.
But that’s another story.
These events form the backdrop to Ghost Money.
Cambodia fascinated me from the moment I first arrived. The people, the contrast between the anything goes, Wild West atmosphere of Phnom Penh and the hardscrabble but incredibly beautiful countryside.
History oozed from the cracks in the French colonial architecture and protruded from the rich red earth, sometimes quite literally in the case of the mass graves that litter the countryside. Things happened every day – terrible events and acts of heart breaking generosity you couldn’t make up if you tried.
I always thought Cambodia would be a good setting for a crime story. But I also wanted to capture some of the country’s tragic history, the sense of a nation in transition. In the mid-nineties, the young wanted change, the old wanted stability. In between was another group. Children of the Khmer Rouge era and the civil war that followed, who’d grown up adapting to the rigid economic and political austerity of Soviet Style system. But as the country opened up, a lot of these people were cut adrift.
The author, Phnom Penh, 1996
I was too caught up in the day to day reporting of events and trying to make a living as a freelance journalist to put much of a dent in the book. That didn’t come until nearly a decade later, when one day I sat down and started reading through some old notes.
In early 2008, my partner and I quit our jobs and moved to Cambodia for a year with our then two year old. I freelanced as a journalist, did fixing work for foreign TV crews and finished the first draft of my manuscript.
A lot had changed. The Khmer Rouge insurgency was over. Sary was on trial for war crimes. The streets of Phnom Penh were full of luxury cars. Tourists could get a shiatsu massage in their ozone neutral hotel, then head out for tapas and cocktails.
On another level, a lot hadn’t. The same people still ran things and the methods they used hadn’t altered. The countryside was still poor and beautiful.
Using the skeleton of the plot I developed in the mid-nineties, the basic plot of Ghost Money, a private investigator searching for a lost businessman amidst the chaos of the Khmer Rouge split, came quickly.
The main character, a Vietnamese Australian in denial about his background, took a lot longer. For various reasons, the Vietnamese are intensely disliked by many ordinary Cambodians, something I wanted to use to create an even greater sense of tension in the book.
Ghost Money is a crime story, but it’s also about the broken country that was Cambodia in the nineties, about what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, the choice they make, what they have to do to survive.
Ghost Money is available on Amazon and Nook for $4.99.
I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.
Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.
When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it. As it turned out, from a journalist’s standpoint, my timing was good.
Unknown to most foreign observers, the Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for many years. Partly this was the result of the government’s relentless military operations. More decisive were internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the spoils from the guerrillas’ logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.
In August 1996, a couple of weeks before I arrived, Ieng Sary, the former Deputy Prime Minister in the charnel house the Khmer Rouge called Democratic Kampuchea, announced he’d split from the movement and wanted to negotiate with the Coalition Government for amnesty.
He claimed he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered Sary was skimming the proceeds from gem mining and logging operations, and were about to move against him.
Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse that eventually resulted in open warfare between the two coalition partners.
But that’s another story.
These events form the backdrop to Ghost Money.
Cambodia fascinated me from the moment I first arrived. The people, the contrast between the anything goes, Wild West atmosphere of Phnom Penh and the hardscrabble but incredibly beautiful countryside.
History oozed from the cracks in the French colonial architecture and protruded from the rich red earth, sometimes quite literally in the case of the mass graves that litter the countryside. Things happened every day – terrible events and acts of heart breaking generosity you couldn’t make up if you tried.
I always thought Cambodia would be a good setting for a crime story. But I also wanted to capture some of the country’s tragic history, the sense of a nation in transition. In the mid-nineties, the young wanted change, the old wanted stability. In between was another group. Children of the Khmer Rouge era and the civil war that followed, who’d grown up adapting to the rigid economic and political austerity of Soviet Style system. But as the country opened up, a lot of these people were cut adrift.
The author, Phnom Penh, 1996
I was too caught up in the day to day reporting of events and trying to make a living as a freelance journalist to put much of a dent in the book. That didn’t come until nearly a decade later, when one day I sat down and started reading through some old notes.
In early 2008, my partner and I quit our jobs and moved to Cambodia for a year with our then two year old. I freelanced as a journalist, did fixing work for foreign TV crews and finished the first draft of my manuscript.
A lot had changed. The Khmer Rouge insurgency was over. Sary was on trial for war crimes. The streets of Phnom Penh were full of luxury cars. Tourists could get a shiatsu massage in their ozone neutral hotel, then head out for tapas and cocktails.
On another level, a lot hadn’t. The same people still ran things and the methods they used hadn’t altered. The countryside was still poor and beautiful.
Using the skeleton of the plot I developed in the mid-nineties, the basic plot of Ghost Money, a private investigator searching for a lost businessman amidst the chaos of the Khmer Rouge split, came quickly.
The main character, a Vietnamese Australian in denial about his background, took a lot longer. For various reasons, the Vietnamese are intensely disliked by many ordinary Cambodians, something I wanted to use to create an even greater sense of tension in the book.
Ghost Money is a crime story, but it’s also about the broken country that was Cambodia in the nineties, about what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, the choice they make, what they have to do to survive.
Ghost Money is available on Amazon and Nook for $4.99.
When fiction meets fact: former Khmer Rouge foreign Minister Ieng Sary dies in Phnom Penh at the age of 87
Ieng Sary. the former foreign minister of the Khmer Rouge, died in Phnom Penh today. Unfortunately, he passed before the trial for genocide for which he was standing, could passed down it's verdict. Sary's 1996 defection from the Khmer Rouge forms the historical back drop of my novel, Ghost Money.
Here's a piece I wrote late last year on how I came to write Ghost Money and the historical background to it.
Sary's death seems like a fitting time to dust off this piece and reprint it here.
I started writing the book that eventually became Ghost Money in 1996 when I worked for several months in Cambodia as a wire service journalist.
I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.
Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.
When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it. As it turned out, from a journalist’s standpoint, my timing was good.
Unknown to most foreign observers, the Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for many years. Partly this was the result of the government’s relentless military operations. More decisive were internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the spoils from the guerrillas’ logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.
In August 1996, a couple of weeks before I arrived, Ieng Sary, the former Deputy Prime Minister in the charnel house the Khmer Rouge called Democratic Kampuchea, announced he’d split from the movement and wanted to negotiate with the Coalition Government for amnesty.
He claimed he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered Sary was skimming the proceeds from gem mining and logging operations, and were about to move against him.
Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse that eventually resulted in open warfare between the two coalition partners.
But that’s another story.
These events form the backdrop to Ghost Money.
Cambodia fascinated me from the moment I first arrived. The people, the contrast between the anything goes, Wild West atmosphere of Phnom Penh and the hardscrabble but incredibly beautiful countryside.
History oozed from the cracks in the French colonial architecture and protruded from the rich red earth, sometimes quite literally in the case of the mass graves that litter the countryside. Things happened every day – terrible events and acts of heart breaking generosity you couldn’t make up if you tried.
I always thought Cambodia would be a good setting for a crime story. But I also wanted to capture some of the country’s tragic history, the sense of a nation in transition. In the mid-nineties, the young wanted change, the old wanted stability. In between was another group. Children of the Khmer Rouge era and the civil war that followed, who’d grown up adapting to the rigid economic and political austerity of Soviet Style system. But as the country opened up, a lot of these people were cut adrift.
I was too caught up in the day to day reporting of events and trying to make a living as a freelance journalist to put much of a dent in the book. That didn’t come until nearly a decade later, when one day I sat down and started reading through some old notes.
In early 2008, my partner and I quit our jobs and moved to Cambodia for a year with our then two year old. I freelanced as a journalist, did fixing work for foreign TV crews and finished the first draft of my manuscript.
A lot had changed. The Khmer Rouge insurgency was over. Sary was on trial for war crimes. The streets of Phnom Penh were full of luxury cars. Tourists could get a shiatsu massage in their ozone neutral hotel, then head out for tapas and cocktails.
On another level, a lot hadn’t. The same people still ran things and the methods they used hadn’t altered. The countryside was still poor and beautiful.
Using the skeleton of the plot I developed in the mid-nineties, the basic plot of Ghost Money, a private investigator searching for a lost businessman amidst the chaos of the Khmer Rouge split, came quickly.
The main character, a Vietnamese Australian in denial about his background, took a lot longer. For various reasons, the Vietnamese are intensely disliked by many ordinary Cambodians, something I wanted to use to create an even greater sense of tension in the book.
Ghost Money is a crime story, but it’s also about the broken country that was Cambodia in the nineties, about what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, the choice they make, what they have to do to survive.
Here's a piece I wrote late last year on how I came to write Ghost Money and the historical background to it.
Sary's death seems like a fitting time to dust off this piece and reprint it here.
I started writing the book that eventually became Ghost Money in 1996 when I worked for several months in Cambodia as a wire service journalist.
I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.
Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.
When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it. As it turned out, from a journalist’s standpoint, my timing was good.
Unknown to most foreign observers, the Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for many years. Partly this was the result of the government’s relentless military operations. More decisive were internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the spoils from the guerrillas’ logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.
In August 1996, a couple of weeks before I arrived, Ieng Sary, the former Deputy Prime Minister in the charnel house the Khmer Rouge called Democratic Kampuchea, announced he’d split from the movement and wanted to negotiate with the Coalition Government for amnesty.
He claimed he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered Sary was skimming the proceeds from gem mining and logging operations, and were about to move against him.
Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse that eventually resulted in open warfare between the two coalition partners.
But that’s another story.
These events form the backdrop to Ghost Money.
Cambodia fascinated me from the moment I first arrived. The people, the contrast between the anything goes, Wild West atmosphere of Phnom Penh and the hardscrabble but incredibly beautiful countryside.
History oozed from the cracks in the French colonial architecture and protruded from the rich red earth, sometimes quite literally in the case of the mass graves that litter the countryside. Things happened every day – terrible events and acts of heart breaking generosity you couldn’t make up if you tried.
I always thought Cambodia would be a good setting for a crime story. But I also wanted to capture some of the country’s tragic history, the sense of a nation in transition. In the mid-nineties, the young wanted change, the old wanted stability. In between was another group. Children of the Khmer Rouge era and the civil war that followed, who’d grown up adapting to the rigid economic and political austerity of Soviet Style system. But as the country opened up, a lot of these people were cut adrift.
I was too caught up in the day to day reporting of events and trying to make a living as a freelance journalist to put much of a dent in the book. That didn’t come until nearly a decade later, when one day I sat down and started reading through some old notes.
In early 2008, my partner and I quit our jobs and moved to Cambodia for a year with our then two year old. I freelanced as a journalist, did fixing work for foreign TV crews and finished the first draft of my manuscript.
A lot had changed. The Khmer Rouge insurgency was over. Sary was on trial for war crimes. The streets of Phnom Penh were full of luxury cars. Tourists could get a shiatsu massage in their ozone neutral hotel, then head out for tapas and cocktails.
On another level, a lot hadn’t. The same people still ran things and the methods they used hadn’t altered. The countryside was still poor and beautiful.
Using the skeleton of the plot I developed in the mid-nineties, the basic plot of Ghost Money, a private investigator searching for a lost businessman amidst the chaos of the Khmer Rouge split, came quickly.
The main character, a Vietnamese Australian in denial about his background, took a lot longer. For various reasons, the Vietnamese are intensely disliked by many ordinary Cambodians, something I wanted to use to create an even greater sense of tension in the book.
Ghost Money is a crime story, but it’s also about the broken country that was Cambodia in the nineties, about what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, the choice they make, what they have to do to survive.
Ghost Money now available in print
Ghost Money, my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia, is now available in print.
Since Ghost Money came out as an e-book at the end of October last year a number of you have been asking when it will be available as a print publication.
Well that time has come.
The print edition of Ghost Money will set you back $15 plus postage and is available from Amazon.
For those of you who haven’t picked it up yet and prefer the e-book experience you can still pick up Ghost Money for your Kindle or e-reader for $3.99 .
Either way it’s a bargain for a slice of Asian favoured crime fiction that the prestigious UK site, Crime Fiction Lover called “the Third Man of Asian noir”.
As always if you have read Ghost Money it’d be great if you could leave feedback on Amazon or Goodreads and, most importantly, drop me a line and let me know what you think.
Since Ghost Money came out as an e-book at the end of October last year a number of you have been asking when it will be available as a print publication.
Well that time has come.
The print edition of Ghost Money will set you back $15 plus postage and is available from Amazon.
For those of you who haven’t picked it up yet and prefer the e-book experience you can still pick up Ghost Money for your Kindle or e-reader for $3.99 .
Either way it’s a bargain for a slice of Asian favoured crime fiction that the prestigious UK site, Crime Fiction Lover called “the Third Man of Asian noir”.
As always if you have read Ghost Money it’d be great if you could leave feedback on Amazon or Goodreads and, most importantly, drop me a line and let me know what you think.
Ghost Money long listed in Australia's Ned Kelly awards for crime writing
The long lists for the 2013 Ned Kelly awards for Australian crime writing have been released.
My novel, Ghost Money, has made the long list for best First Fiction, along with a number of other excellent books.
Ghost Money continues to get excellent reviews. So, if you haven't bought a copy, why not do so.
For those who don't know the plot, here's the pitch:
Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.
But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.
Ghost Money is a crime nove about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.
It's available in digital format for $4.99 and hard copy for $10 plus postage.
The full list of books in all three categories, Best Fiction, Best First Fiction and Best True Crime, is available here on the brand spanking new Australian Crime Writers Association website http://www.austcrimewriters.com/.
Congratulations to all the authors long listed.
My novel, Ghost Money, has made the long list for best First Fiction, along with a number of other excellent books.
Ghost Money continues to get excellent reviews. So, if you haven't bought a copy, why not do so.
For those who don't know the plot, here's the pitch:
Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.
But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.
Ghost Money is a crime nove about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.
It's available in digital format for $4.99 and hard copy for $10 plus postage.
The full list of books in all three categories, Best Fiction, Best First Fiction and Best True Crime, is available here on the brand spanking new Australian Crime Writers Association website http://www.austcrimewriters.com/.
Congratulations to all the authors long listed.
My year in books: Margot Kinberg
Posted on December 4, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 17 Comments
For the second instalment of my year in books series, I’m very happy to welcome Margot Kinberg. Margot is one of those people who make the crime fiction community such a cool place to hang out in, a mystery novelist who has a genuine passion for reading, writing and talking about crime fiction. She has a wonderful website, Confessions of Mystery Novelist. It’s full of thoughtful reviews and features on a truly eclectic selection of crime fiction.
Welcome Margot.
Thanks very much for hosting me, Andrew; it’s a real honour. I’ve been asked to share my five best crime fiction reads of 2013 and to tell the truth, that’s quite a difficult undertaking. I’ve read some fantastic crime fiction this year and it’s very hard to narrow it down to just five novels. Let’s say, then, that these are five novels that have had a profound impact on me. Here they are in no particular order:
Witness the Night, Kishwar Desai
This astounding debut novel tells the story of the murders of thirteen members of the wealthy Atwal family, and the efforts of one social worker to find out what happened on the night they died. It’s an unflinching look at life in Punjab, at the choices people make and why they make them, and at the effects of class, wealth and prejudice. At the same time, Desai’s love for her country is also evident and she gives the reader a fascinating look at one part of India. The writing style is clear and compelling and the protagonists are beautifully drawn.
The Earth Hums in B Flat, Mari Strachan
The real appeal for me in this debut novel is the unusual and unforgettable character of twelve-year-old Gwenni Morgan, who’s coming of age in a small Welsh town in the 1950s. When a shocking death comes to the village, we see its effect on the town through Gwenni’s eyes, and that makes for a fascinating story. But this is as much a story of family, of living in a village with all of its secrets, and of sorting out life as it is anything else. Strachan has created a memorable protagonist and the Welsh setting is especially well-drawn.
Blackwattle Creek, Geoffrey McGeachin
This is a second helping of Melbourne cop Charlie Berlin, who first appears in The Diggers Rest Hotel. What begins as a simple request to look into an oddity about a friend’s funeral draws Berlin into a web of international intrigue, high-level cover-ups and murder. But this is much more than a crime novel and that’s what I found compelling. It’s an authentic look at 1957 Melbourne, a portrait of family life (yes – a cop can have a basically happy marriage!) and a look at politics. It’s also about dealing with the grit in life without succumbing to it.
Cross Fingers, Paddy Richardson
I admit I’m a Paddy Richardson fan, so I am biased. Even so, this novel is truly compelling. Wellington TV journalist Rebecca Thorne is working on an exposé of dubious land developer Denny Graham when she’s asked to do a story on the Springbok’s 1981 rugby tour of New Zealand. ‘The Tour’ was controversial and as Thorne looks into it, she discovers an unsolved murder from that time. For suspense, for an unmistakeable New Zealand setting and for a solid set of mysteries, you don’t get much better than Richardson. I know, cliché, but I couldn’t stop reading it.
The Rage, Gene Kerrigan
In this noir novel, Dublin DS Bob Tidey and Detective Garda Rose Cheney investigate two cases that turn out to have a common thread. Dubious banker Emmet Sweetman is murdered at home. At the same time Vincent Naylor has recently been released from prison and is planning the heist of a lifetime. These stories intersect effectively with the story of Maura Cody, a former nun who witnesses something that draws her into the cases. Through different perspectives, Kerrigan paints an indelible portrait of post-‘Celtic Tiger’ Dublin. There are brilliantly drawn characters and a solid discussion of social issues too.
Here are also a few ‘Honourable Mentions.’
You’re doing yourself a big favour by reading them:
Ghost Money, Andrew Nette
The Dying Beach, Angela Savage
The Twelfth Department, William Ryan
Web of Deceit, Katherine Howell
For the second instalment of my year in books series, I’m very happy to welcome Margot Kinberg. Margot is one of those people who make the crime fiction community such a cool place to hang out in, a mystery novelist who has a genuine passion for reading, writing and talking about crime fiction. She has a wonderful website, Confessions of Mystery Novelist. It’s full of thoughtful reviews and features on a truly eclectic selection of crime fiction.
Welcome Margot.
Thanks very much for hosting me, Andrew; it’s a real honour. I’ve been asked to share my five best crime fiction reads of 2013 and to tell the truth, that’s quite a difficult undertaking. I’ve read some fantastic crime fiction this year and it’s very hard to narrow it down to just five novels. Let’s say, then, that these are five novels that have had a profound impact on me. Here they are in no particular order:
Witness the Night, Kishwar Desai
This astounding debut novel tells the story of the murders of thirteen members of the wealthy Atwal family, and the efforts of one social worker to find out what happened on the night they died. It’s an unflinching look at life in Punjab, at the choices people make and why they make them, and at the effects of class, wealth and prejudice. At the same time, Desai’s love for her country is also evident and she gives the reader a fascinating look at one part of India. The writing style is clear and compelling and the protagonists are beautifully drawn.
The Earth Hums in B Flat, Mari Strachan
The real appeal for me in this debut novel is the unusual and unforgettable character of twelve-year-old Gwenni Morgan, who’s coming of age in a small Welsh town in the 1950s. When a shocking death comes to the village, we see its effect on the town through Gwenni’s eyes, and that makes for a fascinating story. But this is as much a story of family, of living in a village with all of its secrets, and of sorting out life as it is anything else. Strachan has created a memorable protagonist and the Welsh setting is especially well-drawn.
Blackwattle Creek, Geoffrey McGeachin
This is a second helping of Melbourne cop Charlie Berlin, who first appears in The Diggers Rest Hotel. What begins as a simple request to look into an oddity about a friend’s funeral draws Berlin into a web of international intrigue, high-level cover-ups and murder. But this is much more than a crime novel and that’s what I found compelling. It’s an authentic look at 1957 Melbourne, a portrait of family life (yes – a cop can have a basically happy marriage!) and a look at politics. It’s also about dealing with the grit in life without succumbing to it.
Cross Fingers, Paddy Richardson
I admit I’m a Paddy Richardson fan, so I am biased. Even so, this novel is truly compelling. Wellington TV journalist Rebecca Thorne is working on an exposé of dubious land developer Denny Graham when she’s asked to do a story on the Springbok’s 1981 rugby tour of New Zealand. ‘The Tour’ was controversial and as Thorne looks into it, she discovers an unsolved murder from that time. For suspense, for an unmistakeable New Zealand setting and for a solid set of mysteries, you don’t get much better than Richardson. I know, cliché, but I couldn’t stop reading it.
The Rage, Gene Kerrigan
In this noir novel, Dublin DS Bob Tidey and Detective Garda Rose Cheney investigate two cases that turn out to have a common thread. Dubious banker Emmet Sweetman is murdered at home. At the same time Vincent Naylor has recently been released from prison and is planning the heist of a lifetime. These stories intersect effectively with the story of Maura Cody, a former nun who witnesses something that draws her into the cases. Through different perspectives, Kerrigan paints an indelible portrait of post-‘Celtic Tiger’ Dublin. There are brilliantly drawn characters and a solid discussion of social issues too.
Here are also a few ‘Honourable Mentions.’
You’re doing yourself a big favour by reading them:
Ghost Money, Andrew Nette
The Dying Beach, Angela Savage
The Twelfth Department, William Ryan
Web of Deceit, Katherine Howell
