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Tuesday, 02 January 2007 |
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BANGKOK 8 - by John Burdett
BANGKOK 8
By John Burdett
Hardcover: 336 pages
Dimensions (in inches): 1.18 x 9.46 x 6.48
Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (June 3, 2003)
ISBN: 1400040442
'Bangkok 8" opens with a singularly gruesome death. Two Thai detectives approach a Mercedes that they'd been pursuing and is now parked off-road. Inside, a giant python is wrapped around the driver's neck and is consuming his head. One of the detectives shoots the snake through the window. As the door falls open, dozens of small cobras slither out, one affixing itself to an eye of one of the cops. He dies, painfully.
It's a shudder-inducing kick-start to one of the year's most seductive thrillers. John Burdett, a former lawyer who lives in Hong Kong, delivers a third novel that is an intoxicating cultural foray as well as an intricately plotted tale of suspense. Sonchai Jitpleecheep and the dead cop were partners. The two went back a long way. After they'd murdered a drug dealer as teenagers, their mothers had them confined in a monastery. They emerged committed Buddhists with orders from the abbot that they repent by becoming police officers who disavow corruption, an anomaly in Bangkok. After losing his partner, Jitpleecheep resolves that he must try harder with his meditation � as well as find and destroy the killer.
The slain driver was a Marine attached to the U.S. Embassy who'd developed a taste for the finer things in life. With an eye toward supporting his retirement, he'd taken up trafficking, but the question is whether he was trading in precious jade or more precious drugs. One line of supply would connect him with an international dealer with an unsavory reputation and the other to his older brother, a drug lord in Harlem, whose large and colorful presence is soon noted in Bangkok.
Such a seemingly straightforward plot gives way to a welter of sinister developments as the pages become crowded with deliciously intriguing characters, from the dry-witted and savvy police chief to Jitpleecheep's mother. By the novel's end, she has opened a brothel, advertising it's wares on the Internet to the Viagra generation.
She was a former bar girl, one of the legions of workers who service tourists on sex vacations in the red-light districts. Jitpleecheep believes his father to be an American soldier, but she won't tell him more. It is his farang blood that marks him as an outsider, a perspective that allows him a full view and a particular appreciation of all he observes.
"Taking into account that the police are generally facilitating someone else's scam, it begins to look as if 61 million people are engaged in a successful criminal enterprise of one sort of another. No wonder my people smile a lot," he notes. A female FBI agent provides the romantic tension, while a tauntingly flamboyant woman is repeatedly glimpsed at the mystery's core, but the thrust of this novel is Jitpleecheep's complex personality.
"He has a Thai way of falling asleep at the drop of a hat," says another character of Jitpleecheep, "but mention rebirth or nirvana or relative truth, and he perks up."
Think of "Bangkok 8" as a destination spot for any reader with a taste for the exotic and desire for a really good time. -- By SHERRYL CONNELLY
THAILAND EXPAT FORUM RECOMMEND THIS NEW BOOK
Order Bangkok 8 now!
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