Cato Kwong Books in Order

The Cato Kwong novels follow Detective Senior Sergeant Philip 'Cato' Kwong, a Chinese Australian cop working in Western Australia. When readers first meet him he is a fallen golden boy, exiled to the stock squad after taking the blame for a corrupt operation. Carter uses that starting point to explore what it feels like to be an outsider inside the job, juggling loyalty to colleagues with a stubborn sense of right and wrong.

Prime Cut opens in the remote coastal town of Hopetoun, where the mining boom has turned a quiet place into a rough edged success story. The population is swelling with fly in fly out workers, quick money and people who would rather their past stayed buried. When a human torso washes up on the beach, Cato is pulled off stock squad duty into a case that pits him against local power brokers and exposes the exploitation of migrant labour beneath the town's prosperity.

Later books move Cato between the city and the regions as the series gets darker and more complex. In Getting Warmer a missing teenager, a mutilated pig and a nightclub killing show how easily violence hides inside a boom economy, while blunders inside the squad bring heavy scrutiny. Bad Seed and Heaven Sent pull him into the world of Perth developers, Shanghai business deals and murders of homeless people in Fremantle, tying personal history to bigger questions about money, race and who is seen as expendable.

The final instalment, Crocodile Tears, begins with a retiree hacked to pieces in his suburban home and sends Cato far beyond his usual patch. The trail leads to Timor Leste and an old acquaintance, Rory Driscoll, a government fixer who lives in the grey zone between intelligence work and crime. Cato finds himself trying to protect a group of whistleblowers while navigating the long shadows of occupation, war and political convenience.

Across the series readers can expect gritty police work, flashes of wry humour and a strong sense of Western Australian weather and landscape, from red dirt mining towns to the port streets of Fremantle. The books will appeal if you like character driven procedurals, political undercurrents and a detective who is clever, stubborn and just flawed enough to get himself into trouble.