...Mr. Burdett doles his out with a witty, idiosyncratic flair, indulging readers’ taste for the exotic, even as he lets them smile knowingly at others’ less-enlightened tastes ...Bangkok Haunts avoids such nonsense, plunging back into the loopy, superstitious chaos of urban Thailand ...Mr. Burdett saves his best moments for on-the-fly details that do more than supply the requisite colorful detail, hinting at a writer with a generous affection for Thai culture ...does much better with Thais than Westerners, especially Americans, and especially the love-starved, high-strung F.B.I. agent Kimberley Jones, a hopelessly irritating stock character in need of a kill-off if ever there was one ...a book to be gobbled up at top speed, preferably while wearing sunglasses and drinking through a twisty straw. The inhaler is optional.
It is rotten to the core, as it's convincingly portrayed in a wonderful mystery series that is at once sprightly and densely layered, like the Thais themselves ... Haunts in this third of the Sonchai series acts as both noun and verb ...central crime in Bangkok Haunts is the murder by strangulation of a prostitute whom Sonchai once was nuts about ... What never falter are Sonchai's captivating, sometimes teasing voice ––– he often addresses the reader as 'farang' (the Thai word for Westerner) and Burdett's affectionate take on everything visiting farangs find fascinatingly upside down and backward in Thailand ... In Burdett's always amazing Thailand, euphemism is reserved for the sinister.
Sonchai Jitpleecheep, John Burdett's flexible, morally solid embodiment of the modern man, navigates particularly treacherous waters in the spellbinding Bangkok Haunts, his third thriller with Sonchai at its core. To conjure Burdett's unique blend of garishness and gravitas, imagine a Conrad novel transformed into a video game ... Burdett is equally good with male and female characters ...while celebrating an Asian sensuality at odds with some Western notions of morality, is an angry, purgative book ... With Sonchai's relationships as its backbone, this is a book of many currents. It's about differences between West and East, intersections of the sexes, and the relation of man and beast.
Burdett's Bangkok is far more than the bizarre murders, corrupt cops and big-hearted bar girls of his novels, which include Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Haunts ...arguably the most famous red-light district in the world, provides the backdrop of Burdett's stories of Bangkok's underworld and underclass ... The girls working Bangkok's bars, he says, are the real protagonists of his stories, and Detective Jitpleecheep is their mouthpiece ... Jitpleecheep is deeply spiritual yet cynical, with an unflinching but sympathetic eye for both the hunter and the prey, though it's sometimes hard to tell which is which.
The Buddhist monk son of an infamous Thai madam and a Vietnam-era American soldier is detective fiction’s most complex cop, as enigmatic and exotic as his nearly unpronounceable name ...vibrantly bring to life one of the world’s oldest and most fascinating cultures ... Bangkok Haunts is the darkest of the three novels, which all provide a fascinating portrayal of modern life in Thailand. The clash between East and West is nowhere more deftly portrayed than by Burdett...reader is treated to a splendid, intricately plotted thriller replete with the sounds, smells, cuisine and fascinating examination of Buddhism that is at the core of everyday Thai life ...John Burdett continues to satisfy with a series character who grows with each page-turning novel.
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 ...narrated in Sonchai’s urbane weary voice, is filled with intriguing nuggets of Buddhist wisdom and custom... 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.
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 ... Expertly juggling elements that in lesser hands would become confused or hackneyed, Burdett has created a haunting, powerful story that transcends genre.
