Black Tide by
Caroline Carver
pbk out July 04
(Orion)
at £10.99
A thriller, rather than a conventional crime book, though there are
crimes aplenty in it. Written by a British author, who won the CWA
Debut Dagger for a previous novel, it has an unusual setting in Western
Australia, mainly around Perth, though some of the action takes place
at sea.
The central figure is a Sydney journalist, India Kane, who accompanies
a Greenpeace mission to the Southern Ocean to track illegal Japanese
whalers. Their own ship gets sunk with loss of life after being run down
by a mystery container ship (repeatedly misnamed in the blurb as a
'tanker') and after rescue and return to Australia, India devotes herself
to tracing this vessel. Her investigations lead her to Perth, where she
discovers a whole corrupt empire stemming from the Zhuganovs, a
Russian immigrant family who have infiltrated local industry,
government and even the police. She is forced to go on the run from
them after she becomes an embarrassment to their illegal activities and
some of the book is a 'chase' sequence which ends in India being
abducted on the very ship she was seeking.
An exciting and well-written tale, full of 'green' issues about
contaminated waste, dangerous refrigerants and injustice to aborigines,
which do not get in the way of the fast action. One needs the usual
suspension of disbelief, especially when the heroine repeatedly suffers
injuries that would have killed most people – but a good 'page-turner'
in an unusual setting.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Black Tide by
Caroline Carver
