Harvest of Greed
Reggie Ballantyne is a firebug for the times. He’s obsessively clever, full of strong convictions yet willing to sell his services for a song, he’s an urban warrior and he specializes in inventive attacks on some of the biggest wheat and sugar cane fields in the world. Australia’s crazy weather is playing into his hands. It’s baking hot and hasn’t rained in prime farmlands for months.
Young Reggie is caught by country cop Bruce Brown then freed on the instructions of police headquarters. They’re too busy to bother. What a mistake.
Then when big-city screen jockey Alix Kingston’s telephone rings and he is also too busy to take the call, it takes him weeks of battling office politics to realize that he has turned his back on the biggest, life-saving story of his career.
Kingston and Brown finally discover they have just the right mix of divergent self-needs to chase Reggie down. This leads Alix to the knock-out discovery that Chinese government officials are paying Reggie to fulfill his firebug dreams. China! The rising superstar of the world economy. What is it doing in grubby firebug deals in Australia?
Lawless Chinese business practices lead Alix on a treacherous chase through Hong Kong, Outback China and Taiwan. This reveals a world of ruthless Chinese capitalists, decked out in Ray-Ban sunglasses and Gucci suits, and ever-spreading concrete over land grabbed from peasants. Is China saving the world or eating it alive?
Shimmering heatwaves from the Australian wheat arson attacks hang like a mirage over a new world where rampant lust for money meets the climate crisis and global food fears in battles across grains bowls and commodities markets.
Alix faces the challenge of his life chasing answers in a crooked global game of greed.
What others have said of Harvest of Greed:
4.0 out of 5 stars
On the pulse, November 16, 2012
By former Australian Broadcasting Corporation foreign correspondent W. Hamilton (NSW Australia) –
Author Michael Byrnes knows his stuff. He has welded together several intriguing contemporary themes – the rise of China, global warming, food security, the influence of the media – into a fast-paced and engaging story. It is just the sort of book to take on holidays for something substantial, yet entertaining, to read, while splashing on the suntan lotion or wondering why you’ve had to turn up the central heating a further notch each year.
4.0 out of 5 stars
November 5, 2012
(Sydney Australia) –
As a former intelligence officer with the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), trained by MI6 in London, I was immediately taken by the storyline in “Harvest of Greed”. It neatly encapsulates the subterranean plots and machinations often brewing in global commodity markets, which can lead to widespread disruption and damage. As ever, it’s the innocent consumer at the end of the line who pays the ultimate price. Intelligence officers across the globe spend a lot of their time plumbing the depths of this “other world”. With the US economy – let alone the global economy as a whole – in a fragile state, the last thing anyone needs is a new and sudden crisis of the type portrayed in this book. With grain supplies from America, Australia, Canada, the Ukraine and other leading producers so vital to world food supply, we ignore the threat posed by sophisticated market manipulators at our peril. “Harvest of Greed” is a rip-snorting story that lays out their game-plan step by venal step.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Let’s hope this remains fiction
December 29, 2012
By Neil (Melbourne, Australia) –
A pleasant surprise to read a thriller by somebody who understands how crime can mix with international business and politics. And a refreshing approach to have a main character who is a financial journalist and who is familiar with the types of characters involved in this story. The author has put to good use his experience as a foreign correspondent in Asia and as a professional observer of commodity and share markets. He combines the personal dramas of the people involved with the effects of their actions on world markets, and produces an ending in several steps that include both tense personal confrontation and unfolding of results with international consequences. Worth a read.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Believable Piece of Fiction
January 30, 2013
Michael Byrnes has created a wonderful mix of suspense and intrique with the realites of world markets. As a financial journalist and foreign correspondent of long-standing and fine reputation Michael brings unique skills to the task. The drama of the main plot in Harvest of Greed stirs our colletive anxieties about a fragile world where actions of selfish and greedy interests can undermine the lives of many. The geopolitical dimensions of this novel are fascinating and most compelling. It makes for a particularly satisfying read.
5 out of 5 stars
Finally!
May 4, 2013
by MaryAnne Percy-Needham
Finally! An exciting Australian author. Michael Byrnes uses his setting in rural Australia to create a story which is fast-paced and, unfortunately, believable. Unfortunately because it could happen in reality, which would be a disaster for Australia. His use of current affairs only serves to enhance the text. Characters are believable and very human.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book!!!
August 29, 2013
By Roma Naomi Hill
First time read of this author. Could not put it down. Has everything I love in a book. Well done Michael. I look forward to more of your work.
Purchase on Amazon
Dymocks
Australia and the Asia Game (Allen & Unwin, 2006)
Australia is at the threshold of a whole new world. It has discovered that its future lies in Asia and this change involves a total turnaround from the conservative, Anglo-European past. This text challenges some of the myths which swirl around the cocoon of Australia’s rebirth. Australia needs to tap the secrets of booming Asia’s economic success, but the Asia trail is leading Australia into barely explored pathways. These may not lead easily to Asia’s cash but instead into the psychological depths of Asia’s winning game. In explaining the way the game works, the book finds a range of real-world differences between Australia and Asia. These differences explain why Asia’s economic boom is yet to reach Australia. They are also shown to be important ingredients in the power struggles which lie beneath the innocent facade of Australia’s Asia push.
What others said of Byrnes’ first book, the non-fiction work Australia and the Asia Game:
Alison Broinowski, reviewer and author (writing in the Sydney Morning Herald) –
Michael Byrnes’s The Asia Game doesn’t cringe in the face of the tactical sophistication of business and government which he identifies in selected Asian countries. (Broinowski said this in naming Australia and the Asia Game one of the best three books of the year.)
Philip Bowring, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review (writing in The International Herald Tribune) –
This book comes as (a) refreshingly hard-headed look at the relationship long characterised on the Australian side either by ignorance or by well-meaning but simple-minded enthusiasm. Few Australians have been better placed than to observe that than Byrnes, who spent … decades based in Tokyo, Jakarta, Manila and Hong Kong as correspondant of the Financial Review, Australia’s business daily. … It is a well-informed, well-argued contribution to a topic whose import goes beyond Australia and Asia to the relationships between dynamic East Asia and its Pacific neighbours to the east (the Americas) as well as to the south.
Yvonne Preston, former China correspondent for Fairfax Media (writing in Melbourne’s The Age) –
Michael Byrnes is in a position to understand the rules of what he calls “the Asia game” better than most. Diplomats often serve longer but journalists are more likely, by the nature of their calling and because they are rarely treated with deference by authority, to feel the rough edge of the otherwise smooth-talking tongue of the Asian official and to see behind the game-playing front routinely presented to visiting foreign dignitaries and politicians. His important book ‘Australia and the Asia Game’ provides innumerable insights, bluntly stated, into the “game” … it is a healthy analytical antidote…
Max Suich, former Chief Editorial Executive, Fairfax Media (writing in Australia’s The Independent) –
Michael Byrnes has written a sometimes paranoid but nevertheless important book. For all those who invest their hopes in our proximity to the Asian economic miracles … it is essential reading…The strength of this book lies with the facts assembled during Byrnes’ long observation of how Australia has done business in Asia.
Derek Parker (writing in Business Review Weekly, now known as BRW, and in Asian Business Review) –
Byrnes pulls few punches in his analysis of Australia and Asia … (there) are interesting ideas … Australia will have to learn quickly.
Purchase on Amazon
Dymocks
Michael Byrnes 