Alan Carter Books in Order

If you want to meet Cato Kwong from the beginning: Prime Cut → Getting Warmer → Bad Seed → Heaven Sent → Crocodile Tears
If you prefer small town New Zealand noir: Marlborough Man → Doom Creek
If you want a standalone Tasmanian thriller: Prize Catch

Alan Carter was born in Sunderland in the north of England in 1959 and immigrated to Australia in 1991. After arriving he spent many years in Western Australia, living in Fremantle and the small coastal town of Hopetoun. Those shifts in place, from an industrial English city to remote mining country and port suburbs, feed directly into the landscapes of his crime novels. He now lives just south of Hobart in Tasmania.

He studied communication at Sunderland Polytechnic and went on to work as a television documentary director. Years spent following real police, tracing family histories and filming in remote communities gave him a close-up view of how institutions behave under stress. That curiosity about systems and the people caught inside them sits at the heart of his fiction.

Crime writing arrived later, growing out of spare hours in Hopetoun when he finally sat down to turn years of observation into a story.

The result was Prime Cut, the first novel to feature Chinese Australian detective Philip 'Cato' Kwong, a once celebrated officer banished to the stock squad after a scandal. Set during the Western Australian mining boom, the book mixes a torso washed up on a wild coastline with questions about migrant labour, racism and who profits when a small town suddenly fills with money. Prime Cut was shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger and won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, introducing Carter to crime readers in Australia and overseas.

He went on to write four more Cato novels, each widening the map and the moral questions. Getting Warmer returns Cato to a booming city where a missing teenager, a mutilated pig and a nightclub killing expose the darker side of fast cash. Bad Seed sends him from Perth to Shanghai after the massacre of a wealthy family, picking apart global finance and Cato's uneasy ties to Chinese culture. In Heaven Sent and Crocodile Tears the danger moves from Fremantle's streets to Timor Leste, pulling Cato into serial killings, old conflicts and the cost of whistleblowing.

Alongside Cato, Carter created another lead in the Nick Chester books. Nick is a Sunderland born former undercover officer hiding from Geordie gangsters while working as a sergeant in the Marlborough Sounds at the top of New Zealand's South Island. Marlborough Man follows him as he hunts a predator targeting local families and tries to keep his own past buried, and the novel went on to win the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. The follow up, Doom Creek, throws him into gold rush tensions, a doomsday prepper compound and a scandal ridden religious sect, turning a quiet valley into a pressure cooker.

Readers who come for the twists often stay for the people and the sharp sense of Western Australian and New Zealand life.

More recently Carter has turned to Tasmania in Prize Catch, a standalone novel that begins with a fatal hit and run on a lonely road. The story pairs a grieving widow with an ex special forces soldier working at a salmon farm and pushes them into the bush when old war crimes and corporate secrecy collide. The book brings together strands that run through his work, from veterans carrying trauma to the environmental cost of big business.

Today he splits his time between writing and occasional documentary projects, and between the chill of Tasmanian water and appearances at festivals and book clubs. He is a keen swimmer, often described as following the black line up and down a pool or pulling on a wetsuit to brave the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. That steady, stubborn rhythm suits the kind of stories he tells, where everyday lives crash into big public arguments about power, place and who gets left out.