Max Quinlan
Created by Andrew Nette

When we first meet MAX QUINLAN in Andrew Nette's Ghost Money (2012), he's a half-Vietnamese, half-Australian ex-cop working as a private investigator, specializing in finding people who'd rather not be found. His beat? Pretty much all of Southeast Asia

When he's hired by a woman who wants him to find her brother, Charles Avery, a hotshot Melbourne shyster who was last seen in Bangkok and may have become involved in the lucrative but dangerous Southeast Asia gems trade. sure enough, the trail soon leads from Bangkok into Cambodia, where Max is soon tangling with heroin dealers, black ops, tribal warlords, local gangsters and sixteen year old Sarin, a damaged young Cambodian kid trying to make it as a reporter, streetwise but cynical.

Max and Sarin team-up, and it's their odd-couple relationship that adds considerable heart to this often nasty, sordid ride, as Nette offers up a surprisngly nuanced portrait of Cambodia society and its complicated, violent history; deftly avoiding many of the clichés so common in depictions of the region, while never shying away from its grim realities. But it's the unexpected compassion which significantly raise the stakes in the deadly game that Max and Sarin find themselves in.

Andrew Nette is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia, with a fascination for crime fiction and film, obscure pulp novels and all things Asian. He has lived in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, where he worked as a journalist, a communications consultant for the United Nations and a number of non-government organisations.. He has also written for the international news wire, Inter Press Service, and worked on a European television documentary on the international tribunal into the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. He's also one of the founders of Crime Factory Publications, a Melbourne-based small press specialising in crime fiction, and helps edit Crime Factory, its on-line magazine.

UNDER OATH

• "Ghost Money is a fast-paced, atmospheric crime novel. Its journey into a cynical and treacherous world is tense and suspenseful."
  -- Garry Disher

NOVELS

• Ghost Money (2012).. Kindle it!

RELATED LINKS

• The Eyes of Southeast Asia

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.