The Betrayers
Things go wrong in a big way for Candy Somerville when her father commits suicide. Feeling herself responsible, she is driven by guilt into a journey to Thailand on an insane mission. When she arrives in Bangkok in 1992 during the uprising against the military junta, a large amount of heroin is found in her baggage, leading to her imprisonment on a capital charge, in the infamous Klong Prem prison.
Her father’s old friend, a consul at the Australian Embassy, offers to get her legal help but she refuses to talk to him. Her brother and their uncle arrive from Sydney expecting to at least win her bail from prison, but she violently rejects their assistance. Sensing a story, the beautiful Bangkok correspondent for a Sydney television channel works on the brother for information. Meanwhile, the consul and her uncle manage to bribe a corrupt Army colonel to release Candy from prison. Much to her dismay, she is released.
And then the colonel discovers he has been compromised by a news report about her release.
In The Betrayers we read the story as told by six very different participants: Candy’s brother, the consul, his mistress, the reporter, the uncle, and finally Candy herself.
Crime fiction, 1st Edition
December 2004
Paperback, 144pp
210 x 138 mm
ISBN: 1 92078704 6
RRP$aud22-95
The Author
In 1993, Robert D. Morrison left his profession in print, television and radio journalism in Australia and overseas to concentrate on creative writing. Even in childhood, Robert was a voluminous reader with a strong interest in writing. By the time he was in his twenties he had written many short stories that were published, and three novels that weren’t. In the seventies, two of his one-act plays, The Nightwatchman and Liberated, were performed in Sydney.
In Robert’s writing the idea at the centre of his narrative is paramount and its exploration is the purpose of the story.
Robert’s earlier published books
Last Journey (2000)
For young adults
The Secret Sandwich (Margaret Hamilton Books, 1994) short-listed for the Australian Multicultural Children’s Book Award
Javta’s Ghost (Margaret Hamilton Books, 1996)