The Child Soldiers of Melbourne

Fiction

Pages: 228 Ratings:

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An African family, fleeing crime and persecution, is confronted by the same type of violence they experienced in their homeland, in what was supposed to be a haven in a new country.

Inspector Emir ‘Eddy’ Muravic of the AFP is faced with the question: How far would you go for your children? When he is approached by a parent from the local African diaspora community in Melbourne.

What appears to be a simple case of gang crime soon becomes a complex network involving non-government organisations, outlaw motorcycle gangs, a banker and former African mercenaries who were once intelligence assets of Australia’s spy agencies.

How will Eddy navigate cultural sensitivities and, in turn, not raise the eyebrows of ministers in government?

The third instalment of the Muravic series sees Emir taking another step towards becoming part of Australia’s intelligence machine. Or does he want to?

Son of Croatian immigrants, who immigrated to Australia in 1962, Mate Antolos was born in 1971 in Melbourne, Australia. Mate (pronounced ‘Mateh’) later throughout his life was known to his Australian peers as ‘Michael’ or ‘Mike’. Educated in the Catholic School system, he later graduated 1988 and went to Deakin University (Burwood) and completed a Bachelor of Business in Management, sub majoring in English in 1993. After his tertiary education was complete Mate found himself working in Bendigo in the textile industry in a family business, and a few later years was encouraged to go to the University of Huddersfield where he completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Textile Studies 1997. Once he completed his studies, he undertook work experience in England and Northern Ireland, and then returned to Australia to join the family business. Later when the business was sold in 2002, he tried his hand at Textile recycling and a small transport business. When his father passed and he became his mother’s sole carer, and that is where writing found him, and he self-published his first set of short stories on Amazon Kindle KDP under the pseudonym Mate Solotna. After the passing of his mother in 2023, he began a novel, The Uneasy Silence, to help him with mourning the loss of his mum, and in turn to document the changing face of the Mornington Peninsula. Currently, he is writing his second novel the prequel to The Uneasy Silence, called The Fall.