Category Archives: Australian crime fiction

There’s been a hell of a lot of talk about Ghost Money over the last few weeks.

My Google Alerts have been running hot with mention of it. Unfortunately, they are not referring to my gritty crime thriller set in mid-nineties Cambodia. They are referring to secret payments made by Afghanistan’s prime minister Hamid Karzai by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, with the aim of maintaining access to the Afghan leader and his top allies and officials.

The only type of Ghost Money I want to hear about is the type pictured above.

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.… Read more