The most chilling aspect of K.T. Medina's debut novel, White Crocodile, is the way she blends reality and myth to create an atmospheric and disquieting crime thriller. Set in the former killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a group of philanthropic Western landmine-clearers are hiding a secret, and as more and more villagers go missing, more and more volunteers turn up dead.
After her ex-husband died--blown to bits by a supposedly deactivated mine--Tess traveled to the killing fields to dig up both a horrific Cambodian past and her own ghosts. She's been asked to clear a particular field, when the nearby villagers whisper to her about the White Crocodile, a mythic creature stalking the Cambodian countryside like ghosts of the Khmer Rouge's victims. It's been taking their women and girls and wants the Westerners gone. Tess soon realizes that a frightening reality lurks behind the stories.
The novel's greatest strength comes in the way its accurate portrayal of mine-clearing works to supplement a much creepier undercurrent of Cambodian mythology and superstition. One is forced to wonder, when paired with such an authentic setting, whether the more unearthly happenings in the novel are equally true.
Medina spent five years in the U.K. Territorial Army working for the Royal Engineers. Her knowledge of her subject matter is exhaustive and nuanced. As a mine expert, she writes scenes built on a hair-trigger, each packed with energy and tension. Medina's writing radiates with adrenaline and to read it is to step boldly through the book's own booby-traps. --Josh Potter