White Crocodile by K. T Medina
When emotionally damaged mineclearer Tess Hardy travels to Cambodia
to find out the truth behind her exhusband's death, she doesn't know
much about the country or its beliefs.
When she reaches Cambodia, Tess is met with a
country full of ever present danger; the day after her
arrival another clearer is badly injured in the same
minefield - a field superstitious locals call the 'White
Crocodile' minefield. Teenage mothers are also
disappearing from villages around the minefields, while
others are being found mutilated and murdered, their
babies abandoned. The mythical figure of the white
crocodile, signifying death, seems to be the thing
linking all these events together but what Tess
uncovers is far more real and far more terrifying.
'Few crime novels deserve to be called operatic - in the
sense of being larger than life, with emotions etched in
the most striking of colours - but K T Medina's
remarkable debut certainly qualifies for the adjective.
Painted on the most ambitious of canvases, White
Crocodile takes the reader into a Cambodia that
suggests the fraught psychological territory of Joseph
Conrad's Africa in Heart of Darkness.' The
Independent
'The killing fields of Cambodia provide an unsettling
and evocative setting for KT Medina's impressive
debut, White Crocodile. It's a powerful, angry book,
affected by Medina's personal experiences there.'
Marcel Berlins, The Times
K T Medina joined the Territorial Army whilst doing her first degree in Psychology. She spent five years
there, firstly as an officer trainee, then as a Troop Commander in the Royal Engineers.
As Head of Land Based Weapon Systems, at Jane's Information Group, the worlds leading publisher of
defence intelligence information, she visited Cambodia, working with mine clearance charities in Battambang
to provide them with information that would help mine clearers deal with complex mines and IEDs more
safely in the field. She was also privileged to meet Khmers, both adults and children, who had been injured
by land mines and to visit many of the locations that appear in White Crocodile.