Ghost Money now available in paperback & other book related news

As we move with terrifying speed towards the end of 2015, I want to hit you all with a few pieces of book related news.

First up, Ghost Money, my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia is now available in hardback from the publisher, Crime Wave Press. A brand spanking new hard copy of the my novel, which is still getting good reviews, will set you back around $14 plus postage, give or take the exchange rate. I mean, really, as the Yuletide season approaches what better present could you give someone?

For those of you who may be new to this, 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 novel 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.

 Of course, the book remains available for your Kindle as well.

Hard copy and Kindle versions of Ghost Money are available here.

While I hopefully have your attention, please allow me to pull on your collective coats about two other things.

One concerns the non-fiction book I have co-edited with fellow Melbourne writer Iain McIntyre, Beat Girls, Love Tribes & Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture from the 1950s to the 1980s.

When I first posted on this site about Beat Girls I spruiked an end of 2015 release date. The sheer size and complexity of the project has meant the book has taken a little longer than anticipated. But I can now report things are now firmly on track for an early 2016 release.

You can pre-order Beat Girls from Amazon here.

Beat Girls is the first comprehensive account of the rise of youth culture and mass-market paperback fiction in the post-war period. Featuring over 300 pulp covers, many never before reprinted, as well 70 in-depth author interviews and biographies, articles and reviews, Beat Girls offers the most extensive survey of the era’s mass market pulp fiction. Novels by well-known authors like Harlan Ellison, Lawrence Block, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and by filmmakers Samuel Fuller and Ed Wood Jr., are discussed alongside neglected obscurities and contemporary bestsellers ripe for rediscovery. More than 20 critics and scholars of popular culture contributed to this celebration of a fascinating body of work. It is a must-read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, retro and subcultural style and popular fiction.

Last but by no means least, I wanted to mention a new anthology I am happy to announce I am part of, to be released by the good folk at the Melbourne genre publisher, Clandestine Press. The book is going to be called And Then… the Great Big Book of Awesome Adventure Tales, and features stories by some by some of the best-known genre and spec fiction writers around. The only rule specified for all the stories is that they feature a team of two protagonists.

I moved away from my usual shtick in the story I did for And Then… It is called ‘Save a Last Kiss For Satan’ and is a homage to all the seventies occult and Satanic horror film I have seen. That is a lot of films.

Anyway you can get details of all the contributors and the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to help pay for the book at the Clandestine site here.