Prime Cut sounds like the title of a glossy Hollywood thriller. Fortunately, Alan Carter’s début novel is a gritty and engrossing look at crime and racism in a small Western Australian town. Cato Kwong is a Chinese-Australian detective who has been working in the lowly ‘Stock Squad’ since a disastrous arrest some years before. In the novel’s opening pages, Kwong is called to help investigate a brutal murder. He discovers a link between this killing and a similar crime in Britain in the early 1970s. Kwong also uncovers a murky underworld of drug trafficking and exploitative work practices.