White Crocodile
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Set in the shadowy Killing Fields of Cambodia, this gripping military thriller follows Tess Hardy as she works to unravel the mystery of how her husband, and many others, keep disappearing and turning up dead in the mine-laden backwaters of Southeast Asia.
Tess Hardy thought she had put Luke, her violent ex-husband, firmly in her past. Then he calls from Cambodia, where he is working as a mine-clearer, and there's something in his voice she hasn't heard before: Fear. Two weeks later, he's dead.
Against her better judgment, Tess is drawn to Cambodia and to the killing fields. Keeping her relationship to Luke a closely guarded secret, Tess joins his team of mine clearers, who are shaken to the core by Luke's sudden death. Even in their grief, the group remains a tightly knit and tightly wound community in which almost everyone has something to hide.
At the same time, the circle of death begins to expand. Teenage mothers are disappearing from villages around the minefields, while others are being found mutilated and murdered, their babies abandoned. Everywhere there are whispers about the White Crocodile, a mythical beast that brings death to all who meet it. Caught in a web of secrets and lies, Tess must unravel the truth, and quickly. The crocodile is watching, and Tess may be its next victim.
Combining the technical expertise of military suspense with a richly drawn sense of place, White Crocodile forges new ground in the thriller genre. Medina's internationally acclaimed debut announces the arrival of a prodigiously talented novelist whom readers will be discussing for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In British author Medina's absorbing but flawed debut thriller, mine-clearer Tess Hardy, newly arrived in Cambodia, quickly comes to understand why the villagers outside Battambang believe in the White Crocodile a traditional Cambodian symbol of death. A veteran of five years with the British Army's Royal Engineers in Afghanistan, Tess can't ignore the almost palpable sense of menace as, under the cover of a new job with a humanitarian organization, she surreptitiously tries to investigate the death of her estranged husband, Luke, in a mine-clearing accident six months earlier. The author, like her powerful protagonist a former troop commander in the Royal Engineers, convincingly evokes a heartbreaking place that seems to bring out the worst in people ostensibly there to do good. She's less successful integrating the secondary story line of a murder investigation in Manchester, England, or resolving the suspenseful but overly complicated plot. Still, this is a grim tale with grisly details you won't soon forget even though you might prefer to.