Category Archives: Australian crime fiction

This Christmas give the gift of Ghost Money

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Ghost Money-1Okay, it’s been a long year and like you, as 2012 draws to a close, I’m pretty much over everything.

But before I take a few weeks break from the blog, I wanted to pull on your collective coats one more time about Ghost Money, my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia.

The folks at Snubnose Press have decided that for December only, Ghost Money, as well as all their other titles, will cost just 99 cents. That’s – literally – a steal for some seriously excellent crime fiction.

If you have bought and read Ghost Money, regardless of what you think of it, I’d love it if you could give it a review on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads or whatever.

If you haven’t got the book now there’s no excuse. And you can pick up a couple of titles why you are at it. I’m sure it would make an ideal Christmas present for the discerning noir aficionado in your life.

The book is available on Amazon here:

On Barnes & Noble for Nook readers here.

And in a multitude of formats, including e-pub, on Smashwords here.

For those of you who haven’t heard it, here is the pitch.

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of an unstable coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand.… Read more

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Posted in Asian noir, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Noir fiction

Anthologies, my novel and more shameless self-promotion

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

In over a couple of weeks I will be jetting off to spend a couple of weeks in the US, New York mostly, followed by a few days in Philadelphia to attend Noir Con.

I-can-not-wait.

Several more ‘Noir Con noir bust’ posts are scheduled between now and when I leave, but I just wanted to take a short break from these to do a bit of shameless self-promotion. A lot of writing I’ve been working on for the last year is being released around the same time. By the end of the year it’ll be back to the drawing board, but for now I’ve got some serious pimping to do.

First up, is Crime Factory’s latest publication, Hard Labour, an anthology of 17 noir and hardboiled Australian short crime stories, edited by Cameron Ashley, Liam Jose and myself. We launched this baby last week at Grumpy’s Green in Collingwood.  A fine time was had by all and we managed to sell enough copies on the night to more or less pay the printing bill.

The print version of Hard Labour is now available from our website for $13.99 plus postage. The digital book is available on Amazon here for just $2.99.

It’s a bargain for crime fiction this good.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime Factory, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Garry Disher, Leigh Redhead, Noir Con, Snubnose Press

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Book review: Black Wattle Creek

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Black Wattle Creek is the second book by Geoffrey McGeachin to feature Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, a cop on the beat in fifties Melbourne. The first, The Diggers Rest Hotel, won the Ned Kelly award for best first crime fiction in 2011,

The second instalment is set in 1957. There’s hardly a mean street to be found. Melbourne slumbers, as does the rest of the country in a period of post-war peace and prosperity (the fifties are referred to by some as Australia’s ‘lost decade’). Or so it appears, as dark shadows are on the horizon, the threat of communism and growing political instability in South East Asia.

Berlin has a week’s leave owed him but any plans he has to take it easy are derailed when his wife asks him to look into the matter of a dead serviceman, the husband of a friend of hers, who turned up to his own funeral missing a leg and no one knows why.

His off the books investigation leads to a dodgy funeral parlour and to Black Wattle Creek, a former asylum for the criminally insane. When his off sider on the force is beaten and left for dead and Berlin is warned off his inquiries by a couple of thuggish Special Branch cops, we assume it is connected to whatever is going on at Black Wattle.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews

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Launch of Crime Factory’s Hard Labour anthology and other crime writing news

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

There’s a hell of a lot going on crime writing wise for me at the moment.

In addition to the launch of my debut novel, Ghost Money, I have several pieces of short fiction coming out. Things are also busy in regard to Crime Factory Publications, the small press I have stared with two other Melbourne friends, Cameron Ashley and Liam Jose.

On Monday, October 8, Crime Factory Publications is launching its second book, Hard Labour, an all-Australian short crime fiction anthology. I’m one of the editors, along with Jose and Ashley and, as usual, we’ve tried to mix establishing crime writers with talented up and comers. The line up includes Garry Disher (his first Wyatt story, unpublished for over a decade), Adrian McKinty (a Melbourne-based Irish writer, so he counts), Leigh Redhead, Angela Savage, Peter Corris, Helen Fitzgerald, David Whish-Wilson, JJ DeCeglie, Andrez Bergen, Deborah Sheldon, Amanda Wrangles, and many more.

The venue is the same as our first launch in March, Grumpy’s Green, 125 Smith Street, Collingwood. It’s going to be a great night. A selection of the authors will reading from their stories, drinks will be available at the bar and copies of Hard Labour will be on sale for $13.99.

Doors open 7pm, with readings beginning sometime around 8pm.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Christopher G Moore, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, David Whish-Wilson, Garry Disher, Leigh Redhead, Noir fiction, Peter Corris

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Ghost Money now available (is that the sound of rubber hitting the road?)

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

My debut novel Ghost Money is now available through Snubnose Press.

You can get it on Amazon Books for $4.99. Other e-reading formats, Kobo, Sony, etc, to follow. If you haven’t got a Kindle, you can download an Kindle app for iPad and read it that way.

In case you haven’t already heard the pitch for Ghost Money, here it is.

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of an unstable 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, but it’s also about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, and what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, locals and foreigners, the choices they make, what they do to survive.

I’m happy to say it’s already getting some good reviews from heavy hitters on the local crime scene.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Snubnose Press

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