The Tower
It's going to be the biggest skyscraper in the world. One rainy night a young woman falls from an unfinished upper storey, landing on a police car. Detectives Jon McIver and Nicholas Troy think it will be a pretty simple investigation, but all is not what it seems...
Young detective Nicholas Troy is basically a good man, for whom working in homicide is the highest form of police work. But when a woman falls from the construction site for the world's tallest skyscraper, the tortured course of the murder investigation that follows threatens his vocation.
Hampered by politicised managers and incompetent colleagues, Troy fights his way through worlds of wealth and poverty, people-smuggling and prostitution. He has always seen Sydney as a city of sharks, a place where predators lurk beneath the glittering surface. Now he uncovers networks of crime and corruption that pollute the city, reaching into the police force itself.
Finally, the shadowy predator Troy has been chasing turns and comes for him, putting his family at risk. Forced to defend himself with actions he would never have considered before, Troy confronts a moral abyss. He realises it's a long way down.
| ISBN: | 9781742372617 |
| RRP: | $22.99 |
Purchase from the Allen & Unwin website
A note from the author
"I'm hoping The Tower will be the first in a series of crime novels about Sydney. For me the city is a splendid place in which to set such a series, because of the important role crime and corruption have played since white settlement began in 1788.
"Sydney is not uniquely criminal, but its crime does have certain distinguishing characteristics. The one most often pointed out by visitors and foreign observers is the brazen nature of our attitude towards the crime and corruption in our midst. "It's almost as though you feel affectionate about it," an American journalist once remarked to me.
"Some think this is because the city was founded by a largely convict population. Others say it's because Sydney is one of the most secular cities in the world, and doesn't have the same degree of public morality as other places.
"Another characteristic is the disorganised nature of crime and corruption here. Unlike America, with its history of mafia families, Australian criminal endeavours have always been more fluid, with alliances continually evolving and collapsing as circumstances change and new tides of immigrants weep through the city." -- Michael Duffy
