Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the unstable government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessmen 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 a Cambodian 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, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive. Andrew Nette is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He lived in Southeast Asia for six years in the nineties, based in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. During that time he worked as a journalist, and as a communications consultant for the United Nations and a number of non- government organisations. He has since travelled frequently in Asia and lived in Phnom Penh with his family for a year in 2008, where he worked as journalist. His short fiction has appeared in a number of print and on-line publications. Andrew is 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. He helped edit Crime Factory Publication’s Crime Factory: Hard Labour, an anthology of short Australian crime fiction, and LEE, an anthology of fiction inspired by Lee Marvin. It was great to get the chance to talk to Andrew, and this interview ranges over why he writes, his life as a journalist in Cambodia, through the ideas of the pulp fiction genre, and on into why crime fiction is a great platform from which to look at social change. He's a fascinating guy, and this is a great listen! You can find out more at www.pulpcurry.com or follow him on Twitter @Pulpcurry The book's available from http://crimewavepress.com and Amazon.
