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Summary
Summary
Sonchai Jitpleecheep -- the devout Buddhist Royal Thai Police detective who led us through the best sellers Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo -- returns in this blistering new novel. Sonchai has seen virtually everything on his beat in Bangkok ' s District 8, but nothing like the video he ' s just been sent anonymously: Few crimes make us fear for the evolution of our species. I am watching one right now. He ' s watching a snuff film. And the person dying before his disbelieving eyes is Damrong -- a woman he once loved obsessively and, now it becomes clear, endlessly. And there is something more: something at the end of the film that leaves Sonchai both figuratively and literally haunted. While his investigation will lead him through the office of the ever-scheming police captain, Vikorn ( Don ' t spoil a great case with too much perfectionism, he advises Sonchai); in and out of the influence of a perhaps psychotic wandering monk; and eventually into the gilded rooms of the most exclusive men ' s club in Bangkok (whose members will do anything to protect their identities, and to explore their most secret fantasies), it also leads him to his own simple bedroom where he sleeps next to his pregnant wife while his dreams deliver him up to Damrong . . . Ferociously smart and funny, furiously fast-paced, and laced through with an erotic ghost story that gives a new dark twist to the life of our hero, Bangkok Haunts does exactly that from first page tolast.
Author Notes
John Burdettis the author of A Personal History of Thirst, The Last Six Million Seconds, Bangkok 8, and Bangkok Tattoo .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of Burdett's superb third mystery-thriller to feature Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep (after Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo), Jitpleecheep shows old friend Kimberley Jones, an American FBI agent, a vicious snuff film he's received depicting the murder of an ex-lover of his named Damrong. Jitpleecheep and Jones maintain their complex platonic relationship as, helped by Jitpleecheep's assistant Lek, they pursue Damrong's killers. The trail leads them to an important banker, an American teacher, a Buddhist and an exclusive men's club called the Parthenon. Jitpleecheep, who now lives with Chanya, a former prostitute pregnant with his child, is visited in an erotic way by Damrong's ghost, while his corrupt superior, police colonel Vikorn, orders Jitpleecheep to help start a porn film business. Expertly juggling elements that in lesser hands would become confused or hackneyed, Burdett has created a haunting, powerful story that transcends genre. 75,000 first printing; 6-city author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Vice spins the wheels of this third gritty procedural following Bangkok 8 (2003) and Bangkok Tattoo (2005) and featuring Buddhist Thai policeman Sonchai Jitpleecheep. It begins with bangs and whimpers as Sonchai and his sometime associate, FBI agent Kimberley Jones, react emotionally as they view a snuff film that appears to record a notorious prostitute's murder. The dead woman (Damrong) was Sonchai's former lover--a fact that compromises and energizes the investigation that permits Burdett to conduct another mordant whirlwind tour of Bangkok's darkest places as well as the even seamier environs of the Internet. The story, narrated in Sonchai's urbane weary voice, is filled with intriguing nuggets of Buddhist wisdom and custom (e.g., "color-coding" for dress appropriate to specific days of the week) and graced by brief but telling appearances of such recurring characters as Sonchai's Myrna Loy-like wife Chanya, his amoral entrepreneur mother Nong and his superior officer Colonel Vikorn (a meth addict whose ratiocinative powers remain blessedly unclouded). Assisted by his transsexual partner Lek, and a convicted cinematographer ("Yammy") whose price for providing inside blue-movie info is the right to make "artistic" porn films (i.e., with plots), Sonchai labors to ignore the ghosts of his own self-indulgent past while pursuing a comic-operatic gallery of suspects: Damrong's former husband (and pimp?) Daniel Baker; low-life-loving prosperous businessman Khun Tanakan; tireless porn stud Stanislaus Kowlovski; and Damrong's brother Gamon, a priest whose path to righteousness may have been financed by his big sister's illicit earnings. The trail leads to Cambodia, the history of Damrong's wretched family and a savage exercise in investigative technique known as "the elephant game." The plot sputters, but Burdett holds our attention throughout a breezy tale reminiscent of the late, great Ross Thomas's byzantine Asian-inflected capers. Not for your Agatha Christie-loving maiden aunt, but good grisly fun for those who like their noir rated NC-17. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Burdett's first two Sonchai Jitplecheep novels, starring the Bangkok police detective and co-owner, with his mother, of a brothel in the city's notorious District 8, heralded the arrival of a distinctive new voice in crime fiction. His third effort goes further, building on the exquisite moral ambiguity implicit in both setting and hero with tighter plotting and, if possible, an even more potent mix of underworld seaminess, startling tenderness, and Buddhist wisdom. The novel begins with a declaration: Few crimes make us fear for the evolution of our species. I am watching one right now. What Sonchai is watching is a snuff film starring a bewitching whore with the ability to hold men of all types in thrall. Sonchai knows because he was once one of those men and because the now-dead whore, Damrong, has been seducing him nightly in his dreams. Compelled to find the killer and free himself from Damrong, Sonchai follows the trail left by the film, but to get the answers he needs he must confront one of the most powerful men in Bangkok--a move that Sonchai's boss, the elegantly corrupt Colonel Vikorn, vetoes unequivocally. The answers, shrouded in multiple meanings, come eventually, but at great cost to all those involved. Burdett's Bangkok may be the most vibrant landscape of any in current crime fiction, and Sonchai--an improbable mix of West and East, the fact-seeking investigator meets the tranquil Buddhist, at ease with contrary realities--is certainly the genre's most intriguing sleuth. --Bill Ott Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHO knew that "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo" were just the warm-up acts? As vibrantly as those sizzling thrillers captured the exotic flavor of crime and corruption in Thailand's capital city, John Burdett's BANGKOK HAUNTS (Knopf, $24.95) opens up new avenues of awe. Even Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the urbane detective with the Royal Thai Police who narrates the bizarre stories in this series, is struck dumb by the sadistic snuff film that sets the latest gaudy plot in motion. "Few crimes make us fear for the evolution of our species," this devout Buddhist observes. "I am watching one right now." To add to his despair, the woman being strangled in the film is Damrong, a prostitute who was the love of his life when she worked in the Old Man's Club, the brothel Sonchai operates with his mother. Like others who succumbed to Damrong's charms, he's still in thrall to this fascinating creature, who returns in spirit as a sexually voracious wraith who will continue to haunt him if he doesn't bring her killer to justice - and do something about this new development in the city's notorious pornography industry. Daunting enough, the task is complicated by his cheerfully corrupt superior's eagerness to branch out from his methamphetamine business by getting into the porn racket. The ambiguous moral hemisphere Sonchai inhabits can be downright dizzying, but since he observes the rites and rituals of his native culture as conscientiously as he consults a professional colleague from the F.B.I., this selfdescribed half-caste is well positioned to negotiate all paths to enlightenment. Girding himself to outwit a vengeful ghost or a hired killer comes as naturally as offering good-luck lotus blossoms to the Buddha above the cash register at the family brothel. "You live in a magic-ravaged land," Sonchai's F.B.I, contact tells him. But the wonder of Burdett's hallucinatory brand of Southeast Asian magic - which puts his novels in range of the fabulous Yellowthread Street procedurals William Marshall set in Hong Kong and of Colin Cotterill's fanciful mysteries featuring the Laotian coroner-sleuth Dr. Siri Paiboun - is that this spooky stuff is manifested in a real world governed by what Sonchai calls "functional barbarism." The author, who practiced criminal law in Asia and clearly knows his territory, has a fine skill for distilling the morbid beauty (not to mention the grotesque humor) in scenes of everyday misery. But in the end, death-by-ghost still seems a step up from a real-life peasant existence in which children eat dirt and are occasionally stomped to death by elephants. Con Lehane's mysteries about a genial Irish-American bartender named Brian McNulty are as cruelly charming as those Irish saloon storytellers who make sure you're laughing before they flatten you with the sad stories of their lives. Running true to form, DEATH AT THE OLD HOTEL (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95) opens in the still-carefree days of the early 1990s at a hotel bar on Midtown Manhattan's far west side. It's December, and everyone's in a Christmas mood. But holiday spirits take a dive when the nasty manager unfairly fires a waitress and Brian, proud son of an old Commie organizer and a devoted union man, finds himself leading a strike. Goaded by his friend and fellow bartender, Barney Saunders, "a wild, young Irishman" of irresistible appeal, this big-hearted hero tries to prove a connection between the manager and a crooked union boss, and before you know it, two people are shot dead - and everyone on the picket line is a suspect. For all the sentimental trimmings he hangs on this tale, Lehane has an honest feel for the working-class life of New York. And he's clear-eyed about those crimes of the heart that have nothing to do with class. There are certain places on this earth so eerie in their austere beauty that they fairly demand to be used as the setting for a mystery. In RAVEN BLACK (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), Ann Cleeves obliges with a chilling tale set in a remote Scottish village in the Shetland Islands. The murder plot is fairly straight-forward: a teenage girl is found strangled, and the killer, according to local rumor, is a crazy old man who lives alone and has long been suspected in the disappearance of another local girl. But before the police can make a case, yet another child disappears. On these bare bones, Cleeves drapes moody descriptions of the harsh climate conditions on "bare wastes of heather moorland," stark observations on the revolting instincts of birds of prey and suggestive profiles of characters who have lived too long in these lonely parts. Never mind the murders; her study of a forgotten soul waiting for someone to come to his door and wish him a happy new year is enough to freeze the blood. In THE BROKEN SHORE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), Peter Temple drops the clipped delivery that gives a hard edge to his popular Jack Irish mysteries and delivers a mature and measured account of the kind of crimes committed in the dead quiet of rural Australia. Joe Cashin, his Victoria Police homicide detective, is also a different breed of hero. Unlike Jack Irish, who is as tough as old boots, Cashin has been sensitized by a close call with death and is making a slow recovery in the coastal area where he grew up. But when two Aboriginal youths caught with goods belonging to a murdered white man are killed in a police shootout, Cashin can't ignore the region's virulent strains of racism. Along with giving us mournful scenes of civilization's slow encroachment on an idyllic countryside, Temple offers some provocative and painful views of Australia's inner landscape. John Burdett Even the urbane detective who narrates Burdetts Bangkok thrillers is appalled by the snuff film that sets his latest plot in motion.
Library Journal Review
Royal Thai Police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is shocked by a video he receives. It depicts a murder, and the victim is a woman he still loves. With a six-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.