Max Quinlan is a PI on the trail of a shady Australian businessman who’s gone to ground in Southeast Asia. Quinlan, a half-Vietnamese, half-Australian ex-cop, has only recently taken up the detective mantle but he quickly becomes embroiled in post-war shenanigans in a 1996 Phnom Penh that is populated by shady characters, both foreign and local. He teams up with a Cambodian journalist and trawls back in time, through the Untac years, the long civil war, the genocide and the Killing Fields, the Vietnamese liberation and the ensuing civil war.
Quinlan is a contradictory guy, an ex-copper who blushes when spoken to by an Asian woman but can’t get his clothes off quick enough with a girl from Central America. He is in almost-denial of his Asian heritage and he absorbs Cambodia’s tragic history from a number of sources like a sponge without ever falling into the cynicism one might expect from his kind.
There is plenty of action in Ghost Money (the title refers to the sheets of paper or paper crafts burnt as ancestral offerings in Chinese tradition), especially in the second half of the book, as Quinlan edges closer to Cambodia’s heart of darkness, the nexus between a beleaguered Khmer Rouge and shameless foreign businessmen – the last game in town, in this instance Pailin, a last Khmer Rouge hold-out near the Thai border, at the time an independent economic zone that financed itself by selling gem stones and offering every vice known to man, precisely the kind of thing the Cambodian revolution had tried to eradicate only a couple of decades earlier.
Writing a crime novel set in this sad and violent Cambodia without delving into the country’s extreme history seems impossible. Nette knows his shit when it comes to the bloody convolutions of the Southeast Asian kingdom and spins a gripping yarn of greed and madness in the late 20th century. While feeding the reader with the horrors of our time, he also finds the space to skillfully reward us with the conventions of the genre – memorable femmes fatale, effective bad guys (not just one), fast action and lively dialogue. Quinlan, our man in Cambodia, beaten and pushed, cornered and outgunned, takes it all in his stride, ready for a sequel to Ghost Money, apparently.
Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette, is available now from Amazon.com as an eBook for $1.15.