Review: CROCODILE TEARS, Alan Carter

• 
  This edition published by Fremantle Press 2021
• ISBN 9781925816570
  
• 333 pages
• #5 Cato Kwong series 

Synopsis (publisher) 

Detective Philip ‘Cato’ Kwong is investigating the death of a retiree found hacked to pieces in his suburban Perth home. The trail leads to Timor-Leste, with its recent blood-soaked history. There, he reunites with an old frenemy, the spook Rory Driscoll who, in Cato’s experience, has always occupied a hazy moral terrain.

Resourceful, multilingual, and hard as nails, Rory has been Canberra’s go-to guy when things get sticky in the Asia-Pacific. Now Rory wants out. But first he’s needed to chaperone a motley group of whistleblowers with a price on their heads. And there’s one on his, too.

Part espionage thriller, part police procedural, Crocodile Tears shows powerful forces, at home and abroad, determined to keep their secrets buried. At any cost.

My Take

Cato Kwong is has moved to of Perth's Major Crimes Unit ( I have to admit that I haven't read the last two novels in the series), he is married, and has a small child. He is recently wounded while on duty, and close to burn-out. His wife Sharon works with the airport police, and they lead busy and demanding lives. Something's got to give.

This is a novel that keeps you on your toes, with two narrative streams: one for Cato, and one for Rory Driscoll, ex-spook, who is introduced in a prologue with an incident 14 years earlier.

In Perth a retiree is found dead, multiple slash wounds, missing an ear. He is an ex-cop and Cato is convinced the missing ear is a clue. This murder is followed with that of an ex-teacher, eyes gouged out. What connects these two?

Meanwhile a passenger, apparently Timorese by birth, has a meltdown on a plane landing at Perth airport, and comes to Cato's wife's attention.

So, a complex plot, made more complex by the introduction of Rory Driscoll, former spook, aboriginal. His ex-employer, nick named Aunty, Canberra intelligence mandarin, wants Driscoll to make sure three whistle blowers are able to report to a meeting of a committee from the Hague in Darwin in three weeks time. Their names are on a hit list and so is Rory's. Timor-Leste appears to connect the other three, but Driscoll can't think what has put his name on the list.

I think I suffered a little from the fact that I had not read books #3 and #4 in the series, although CROCODILE TEARS works pretty well as a stand-alone. Plenty to think about. Quality Australian writing.

My rating: 4.6

I've also read

• 4.7, PRIME CUT - Cato Kwong #1
  
• 4.7, GETTING WARMER - Cato Kwong #2
• 4.6, MARLBOROUGH MAN
• 4.5, DOOM CREEK  

Alan Carter - Awards

Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel (Winner 2018)
Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction (Winner 2011)
UK Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award (Shortlisted 2010)

Review: DOOM CREEK, Alan Carter

• 
  Publisher : Fremantle Press (March 1, 2021)
  
• Language : English
• Paperback : 304 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1925816818
• ISBN-13 : 978-1925816815
  
• #2 in the Nick Chester series

Synopsis (Amazon)

Sergeant Nick Chester has dodged the Geordie gangsters he once feared and is out of hiding and looking forward to the quiet life. But gold fever is creating ill feeling between prospectors, and a new threat lurks in the form of trigger-happy Americans preparing for doomsday by building a bolthole in the valley. As tensions simmer, Nick finds himself up against an evil that knows no borders and no depths.

Sequel to MARLBOROUGH MAN

My take

Set in New Zealand, in what should be an idyllic back water, the plot proves that not even New Zealand is safe from the underworld and those who use money to get what they want. Several plot strands intertwine to prevent Nick Chester from focussing just on local issues and local policing. 

I think it helps to have read the first in this series, which I had.

My rating: 4.5

I've also read 4.6, MARLBOROUGH MAN

Review: MARLBOROUGH MAN, Alan Carter

• format: audio (mainly) Audible
• Narrated by: Jerome Pride
• Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Release date: 12-01-18
• Language: English
• Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Synopsis (Audible)

Nick Chester is working as a sergeant for the Havelock police in the Marlborough Sound, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. If the river isn’t flooded and the land hasn’t slipped, it’s paradise. Unless you are also hiding from a ruthless man with a grudge, in which case remote beauty has its own kind of danger. In the last couple of weeks, two locals have vanished. Their bodies are found, but the Pied Piper is still at large.

Marlborough Man is a gripping story about the hunter and the hunted and about what happens when evil takes hold in a small town.

Ngaio Marsh Award 2018
Alan Carter’s Marlborough Man (Fremantle Press) has won the 2018 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.
The novel, about an ex-undercover agent from England trying to distance himself from his dangerous past and settle into a quieter life as a local cop in the Marlborough Sound, was chosen from a shortlist of six, with judges calling it a ‘terrific, full-throated crime thriller that puts the freshest of spins on the cop-with-a-past trope’.

My Take

This novel has a chequered history for me. I began reading it on my kindle, then found an audio version which I decided to listen to with my fellow traveller on our weekend journeys. At the end of today I had just an hour left to listen to and so decided to read the final chapters on my kindle.

For some reason I didn't at first really take to Jerome Pride's Geordie narration, but as it proceeded the story took over. By the end I really just wanted to know how the story came together.

Nick Chester is a cop from Sunderland (UK) who was part of an undercover operation to bring down one of the local underworld bosses. He has been sent to New Zealand as part of a protection programme, and for the first half of the novel is waiting for the thugs to catchup with him.  When they finally arrive though, and that element of the plot is solved, the local elements of child abductions takes over.

The New Zealand setting and excellent writing gives him the 2018 Ngaio Marsh award.
Also shortlisted for the 2018 Ned Kelly Award.

Good reading.
It reminded me that I really need to read more Alan Carter.

My rating: 4.6

I've also read
4.7, PRIME CUT
4.7, GETTING WARMER

Review: GETTING WARMER, Alan Carter

• kindle edition
  
  
• published 2013, Fremantle Press
• ISBN 9781922089205

Synopsis (Fremantle Press)

Cato Kwong is back. Back in Boom Town and back on a real case – the unsolved mystery of a missing fifteen-year-old girl. 

But it’s midsummer in the city of millionaires and it’s not just the heat that stinks. A pig corpse, peppered with nails, is uncovered in a shallow grave and a body, with its throat cut, turns up in the local nightclub. 

As a series of blunders by Cato’s colleague brings the squad under intense scrutiny, Cato’s own sympathy for a suspect threatens to derail his case and his career.

My Take

The "hook" in this novel is a Prologue describing a conversation between a serial killer and a female Psychology student who has a lot to learn about listening.

Cato Kwong has returned to Fremantle from the "stock squad", but he knows it would be easy to put a foot wrong and be sent bush again. The novel opens with Cato accompanying a police squad and a murderer, presumably the one in the Prologue, to a desiccated lake, looking for a body. Gordon Francis Wellard is already serving a sentence for murder: they are looking for the body of a previous victim.

Corruption is rife in the police force particularly amongst detectives who are looking for the information that will give them the edge in a case. Deals done with criminals are often long lasting, and even the cleanest cops can find themselves doing something they know they shouldn't.

This is #2 in Carter's Cato Kwong series and he has fleshed out more background for Cato, and I think the novel is written in a grittier style. The new setting in Fremantle brings with it new characters, some of whom Cato has apparently worked with before, some he knows by reputation. Current social issues surface, such as territorial wars between bikie gangs, and Vietnamese protection gangs. 

Cato's family circumstances play a greater role too, and put the dangers of the sort of police work he does into greater perspective.

Carter's first novel PRIME CUT won him a Ned Kelly Award for best first novel, and GETTING WARMER affirms that he is a writer to watch.

My Rating: 4.7

Also Reviewed
4.7, PRIME CUT