Book Review: THE FEAR ARTIST by Timothy Hallinan

Title: The Fear Artist (Poke Rafferty Mystery #5)
Author: Timothy Hallinan
Kindle; Hardcover to be released July 17, 2012; Soho Press
Genre: thriller

The main character: Poke Rafferty is a travel writer living in Thailand with his wife Rose and adopted daughter Miaow. He has gotten involved in solving murders and crimes before in the City of Angels which is Bangkok, and this is the fifth in the thriller series featuring Poke, in which crime and politics just seems to single him out for involvement.

The plot: Poke is minding his own business on the Bangkok streets, buying paint for their apartment while his wife and daughter are away visiting relatives in the northeast. Demonstrators against government policies in the volatile south of Thailand are suddenly dispersed by police and come rushing down the street when Poke is carrying two cans of paint out of a store. He is hit and sent sprawling on the sidewalk by one of the runners, a heavyset foreign man, who collapses in his arms, evidently having been shot at least three times by the police. The dying man, an American, whispers three words to Poke before he dies.

Poke goes into hiding for fear of his life and warns his wife and child to stay away from Bangkok indefinitely. The Thai police have already questioned him about the dead man, whom the CIA and other unknown people are curious about. Poke uses former spies from Russia and Eastern Europe and former Vietnam veterans, all living in Bangkok, to find out more about a red-haired man who is behind the attempt to link Poke with the dead man in a situation that Poke knows nothing about. The red-haired man is involved in resolving the Muslim insurgency and the "War on Terror" in the south of Thailand.

Help for Poke comes from his half-sister Ming Li, Poke's police friend Arthit, and his savvy neighbor Mrs. Pongsiri, to avoid the Thai police and the red-haired man while he figures out the significance of the three words the dying man whispered to him.

My comments: I read the book twice to get all the nuances of the plot, which was complicated to me as it involves Southeast Asia's past and its present. I read it first noting all the personal relationships that are important in the book - Poke with his wife and teenage daughter; his friend Arthit who carries around the memory of his deceased wife Noi; Arthit's growing relationship with Anna, the friend of his dead wife; Poke's daughter's friendship with a nerdy teen; the red-headed man's relationship with a drug addicted wife and a crazed teenage daughter, and so on.

I read the book again to get the political lowdown of Vietnam in the past and Southern Thailand in the present. The plot catches it all together neatly, while you travel every step of the way with Poke in hiding and Poke detecting, planning, surviving and deducing how to get out of his strange and unwanted situation.

".... But Jesus, Poke. You're supposed to be a travel writer, as far as I know. How does someone like you get this devious?" 

"I'm just writing," Poke says. "I got stuck in somebody else's story. All I'm trying to do is write my way out." ( ch. 26, from an uncorrected proof. The final copy may differ.)

A great thriller that will draw you in, into the relationships between what will seem like real people, and into a political situation with what will seem like true life villains. The characters are well drawn and realistic, the plot is superb, the thrill of the race is exciting, the setting in flooded Bangkok is exotic and a great place to be, from an armchair.

Thanks to the author for an ARC of The Fear Artist . My objective rating: 5/5.

Sunday Salon: Books Set in Asia

Welcome to the Sunday Salon.

I was really happy to receive two surprise books yesterday, thanks to the publishers, both novels set in India.

The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken: A Vish Puri Mystery by Tarquin Hall will be released July 10, 2012 by Simon and Schuster. It's a mystery novel set in New Delhi. I've read The Case of the Missing Servant, the first in the series, and really enjoyed the main character, India's P.I. Vish Puri.

I received the ARC of Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes by Betsy Woodman, the first in a planned series of books featuring Jana Bibi, her chatty parrot, and her housekeeper, living in Hamara Nagar, India. The book will be released July 17, 2012 by Henry Holt.

I'm in the middle of reading
Mingmei Yip's Skeleton Women, a novel set in early 1930s Shanghai,
finished The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam, set in the Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and
finished The Fear Artist (A Poke Rafferty Thriller) by Timothy Hallinan, a thriller set in Bangkok.

I plan to write reviews of the above three but may not post two of them till their release dates in the U.S! These books are going to take some thinking to review; they are pretty complex, with complex settings, and complex situations and characters. But I think I'll enjoy doing it.

What's on your plate for the next couple of weeks?

Friday Finds: Food and Mysteries

Found these the other day but as they deserve their own post, they are listed under Friday Finds, a meme hosted by Should Be Reading. Here's what I found while browsing at the library.

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself
by Ann Mah (2010). Mah was born in California, worked in Beijing as dining editor for a magazine for four years, won a James Beard Culinary Scholarship, and now lives in Paris. Lucky lady!

Blood Hina: A Mas Arai Mystery by Naomi Hirahara (2010). Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winner. She lives in southern California. In this mystery novel, her character Mas Arai must clear his friend's name after the friend's fiancee goes missing.


Paper Butterfly: A Mei Wang Mystery by Diane Wei Liang (2009). The author is a graduate of Peking University and lives in London. Mei Wang is a successful private investigator in Beijing and appeared in the first mystery, The Eye of Jade.

Also couldn't resist the books of two of my favorite mystery/thriller authors:

A Nail Through the Heart: A Novel of Bangkok by Timothy Hallinan (2008). This books features travel writer Poke Rafferty and his adventures in Bangkok. One of the follow up novels is The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller, to be released in August.

A Darker God: A Laetitia Talbot Mystery (Mortalis) by Barbara Cleverly (2010). Cleverly writes historical and archaeological mysteries in unusual settings. Her titles include The Last Kashmiri Rose, The Damascened Blade, and The Tomb of Zeus. She lives in Cambridge, England.

Book Review: The Godfather of Katmandu by John Burdett

In The Godfather of Kathmandu, a crime thriller with a twist
by John Burdett, Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep must solve the bizarre murder of a wealthy American filmmaker in Bangkok.

Detective Sonchai is the son of an American father whom he never knew and a Thai mother whom he is devoted to. At the beginning of the novel, he doesn't know what to make of the apparent murder of the American visitor, a well known director of Hollywood films, whose death in a Bangkok flophouse is staged in a theatrical and shocking manner. Solving this crime takes all his effort and insight and introduces Sonchai to some very colorful individuals.

Comments: The personality and character of the detective makes and carries the book, no doubt about it. Sonchai is torn between doing the bidding of his corrupt superior
 in the Thai police force, and following the directions of his spiritual Buddhist mentor, Norbu Tietsin. When these two people both pull him into an illegal transaction,
the detective is torn between duty, his sense of right and wrong, and the difficulty of his situation. He develops an ironic and sometimes comic view of himself and everyone around him by the end of the book.

"I'm supposed to be a mafioso, a despicable international drug trafficker, a poor sucker among six billion poor suckers ensnared irrevocably in karma from which there has never been any escape and for which therefore I experience no responsibility even if it is all my fault."

All clues seem to lead to Katmandu, Nepal, which Sonchai visits several times, getting information there and in Hong Kong, and back in Bangkok.

An incredible plot, I thought as I read along; I finished the book and gave it four stars. Burdett has written at least three other crime novels featuring Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, all entertaining semi-noir fiction.

(Also reviewed by The Book Catapult and Eurocrime)

Challenge: 100 + Reading Challenge,Support your Local Library Challenge, Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge

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Book Review: The Risk of Infidelity Index by Christopher G. Moore

The Risk of Infidelity Index: A Vincent Calvino Crime Novel by Christopher G. Moore

P.I. Calvino makes a surveillance video of an outfit manufacturing fake drugs in Bangkok, but the lawyer who hired him for the job dies from an apparent heart attack before paying Calvino for the video.

To find out more about his dead client, Calvino takes a job from three mem farangs, foreign women, whose husbands may know more about his client. The women hire Calvino to spy on their husbands for any signs of cheating. Bangkok has a high infidelity risk factor, according to a book the women have been reading, The Risk of Infidelity Index. Calvino wheedles information from the women about their husbands who knew his dead client, finds out who's behind the fake drug making scam, and finally gets paid for his work, all while risking his life many times over and barely escaping intact.

My favorite secondary characters in the novel are Colonel Pratt, a local police officer who helps keep Calvino alive, and Calvino's office assistant, Rachana. Both are staples in the suspenseful detective series.

Publisher's description: " Vincent Calvino, disbarred American lawyer turned Bangkok PI, comes to North America at long last with a gripping novel set in a superbly textured, masterfully rendered Bangkok." The ninth novel in the PI series, it's the first printed in the U.S.,Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007.

Recommendation: For those who like detective crime fiction in international settings. I rated this four out of five stars. I also gave 4 stars to the 11th Calvino book, Paying Back Jack.

Challenge: 100 + Reading Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge, Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge

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Book Review: Paying Back Jack by Christopher G. Moore

Paying Back Jack is 11th in the detective series featuring PI Vincent Calvino. It has a complex plot about paying back old scores, in Bangkok, a city which seems like one of the most interesting but challenging places in Southeast Asia.

The novel has so many plot components that it's sometimes hard to keep track of and link all the people and their activities. There are personal scores to settle involving people who had worked in many different places - Southeast Asia, in Iraq, and in the Middle East war zones.

The intrigue starts when Calvino is hired by Casey to find the man responsible for his son's death. The case is more complex than it seems. Calvino becomes embroiled in more than he bargained for.

"Casey, the private contractor with interrogation expertise, good street contacts, and a payload of anger over a dead son, was locked in a version of the past fueled by hatred." (p. 206)

This is more than just a detective novel set in an exotic location. Moore's writing shows flashes of creative brilliance as well as insight into the local culture.

"A vapor trail of superstition hung above the table, streaking the conversations with sentiments from an old, traditional culture. For a moment, she almost felt at home."

"He was happy that she finally had what every Thai woman wished for: motherhood. To become the mother goddess was to achieve a vindication, to have climbed to a sacred platform and claimed a throne." (p. 134)

After finishing this book, I thought Moore could easily use his talents to write literary fiction.

I then discovered, thanks to a comment by blogger Mark David, that Moore has written 20 books, including short stories and nonfiction books on Thai culture and customs. In this Amazon link, Christopher G. Moore, there is a list of titles in his Vincent Calvino PI series. Moore, a Canadian, has lived in Bangkok since 1988 and has a background in law.

Paying Back Jack , hard cover, 339 pages, was printed by Grove Press in 2009.

Challenge: 100+, Support your Local Library Challenge, Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge
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Book Review: Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller by Timothy Hallinan


"Behind every great fortune is a great crime..." is the premise for Timothy Hallinan's latest thriller, Breathing Water.

The book is set in the Bangkok of today and has all the complications of its real life - a shaky political situation, great poverty and great wealth, street children and those who prey on them, corruption, and the pull of love and death. This all makes for a great setting for a thriller, plus an engaging plot that pulls all the complexities of the city together.

From the publisher's description:

For American ex-pat writer Poke Rafferty, a late night poker game delivers an unexpected prize: an "opportunity to write the biography of Khun Pan, a flamboyant, vulgar, self-made billionaire with a criminal past and far-reaching political ambitions. The win seems like a stroke of luck, but as with so many things in vibrant, seductive, contradictory Bangkok - a city of innocence and evil, power and poverty - the allure of appearances masks something much darker.

Within a few hours of folding his cards, Rafferty, his wife, Rose, beloved adopted daughter, Miaow, and best friend, Arthit, an honest Bangkok cop, have become pawns in a political struggle among some of Thailand's richest, most powerful, and most ruthless people.

A great book for mystery/thriller readers.