Here we have the fifth of John Burdett’s “Bangkok novels,” all of them featuring the philosophical Buddhist police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep and all of them redolent — in the most enjoyable way — of crime, violence, corruption and sex, not necessarily in that order. “Vulture Peak” upholds the high standards set by its predecessors. Readers who know the first four novels will be delighted to have a fifth, and others coming to Burdett’s Bangkok for the first time will quickly find themselves in a place that may seem mysteriously alien but positively teems with humanity.
It was my good fortune to stumble across advance proofs of the first of these novels, “Bangkok 8,” nearly a decade ago, and to be entirely taken with it. By 2003, when that novel appeared, Burdett had published two previous crime novels but had attracted relatively little attention. A native Englishman living and practicing law in Hong Kong, he turned things around with “Bangkok 8,” to the extent that he has given up his (very successful) legal practice and divides his time between Thailand and France.
Burdett’s novels are not for prigs. Bangkok swarms with prostitutes, and so do his books. His attitude toward them is utterly unjudgmental. Four years ago he told an interviewer for the New York Times: “Prostitution is the oldest profession that we know of, and it isn’t going to go away. The only time it’s ever gone away is in police states, and even then the police state had to be at its most hysterical.” Thailand as he portrays it has plenty of police, but they do not merely wink at the prostitutes, they openly collaborate with them. The sublimely cynical police Col. Vikorn, a regular character in the Bangkok novels and Sonchai’s boss, plays the game for all it’s worth, never more so than in “Vulture Peak.”
That is the name of a place not far outside Bangkok where “someone rich and famous from Hong Kong built a stately pleasure dome high on a hill in Phuket overlooking the Andaman Sea.” As the novel opens, Sonchai has been sent there to investigate a murder: three corpses laid out on an immense bed, “stripped of faces, eyes, genitals, and . . . kidneys and livers too.” There isn’t a drop of blood there or anywhere else. Sonchai has been put on the case by Vikorn, who wants to go after trafficking in human organs not because it is a crime, but because he is running for governor of Bangkok and wants to get the credit for breaking a human-parts operation.
When he appoints Sonchai as head investigator, the latter’s understandable response is, Why me? Well, he speaks English; he “can pass for near white”; he is “accustomed to international travel”; and — the clincher — “you’re actually interested in truth and justice.” So even though Sonchai knows full well that he’s being used, he also knows that Vikorn has him dead to rights. Vikorn tells him that “your goody-two-shoes Buddhist conscience will drive you till you drop” and that when the case is solved, he will merely have to tell the truth:
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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