Customer Reviews

Bangkok Haunts

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved John Burdett's "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo" thus was anxiously awaiting, "Bangkok Haunts", and I was not disappointed. In many ways, these novels get better and better. In Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Burdett has cast a character like no other in literature. When I rhapsodize about Burdett's Bangkok novels to friends and explain that the protagonist is a Buddhist detective who co-owns a whorehouse in Thailand with his mother...they DO look incredulous! But I was hooked from the first pages of the first book.

"Bangkok Haunts" is rich with all the things I loved about the other novels; descriptions of Thai culture, cuisines, religion, history...traffic...the sex trade...ghosts...foreigners...Burdett makes fascinating the not-so-subtle differences between the "Western" and the "Thai" mind-set. This is the kind of stuff that both entertains and enlightens. I don't often agree with Burdett's/Jitpleecheep's opinions on the efficacy prostitution and corruption, but I am always intrigued, interested and better informed for having thought things through. My only quibble with the plot is the frustrating and incomprehensible relationship between Kimberly (the FBI) and Sonchai's trans-gender partner, Lek. I'll suspend my irritation for now, though; maybe that's the next book!

Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a member of the Royal Thai Police force, is perhaps the only Bangkok cop not on the take in one of the most corrupt police departments in Southeast Asia. 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. We john met the multicultural Sonchai in BANGKOK 8 and BANGKOK TATTOO, John Burdett's two bestselling novels that so vibrantly bring to life one of the world's oldest and most fascinating cultures.

In this third installment, Sonchai has settled down in domestic happiness with his pregnant girlfriend in his modest Bangkok apartment. He finds on his doorstep a hand-addressed package. In it is a snuff porn film starring Damrong, a well-known prostitute who once worked in his mother's Cowboy District brothel, with whom he had carried on a brief dalliance. When he checks on her whereabouts, he discovers she is missing and comes to the realization that the killing was not an act --- the murder portrayed in the film was genuine and performed live in front of the cameras.

Damrong's ghost begins to haunt Sonchai's dreams as he launches an investigation into the identity of the film's producers. Over the objections of his superior, General Vikorn, he calls on his FBI colleague, American Kimberley Jones, for help after he learns that she is in Thailand following a lead on the growing number of snuff films being produced in the increasingly lucrative Southeast Asian sex trade. Together they hunt down the highly placed officials and businessmen at the top of a billion-dollar porn industry.

Sonchai's relationship with General Vikorn, who is the epitome of elegant corruption with a penchant for exquisite art collections and high living, is a study in Sonchai's ability to adapt his stringent Buddhist faith and its karmic effects to the harsh realities of crime fighting.

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, whose longtime residency in this multicultural society provides him with the background for vivid authenticity in his literate portrayal of its people. The 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.

Newly arrived among the venerable handful of literary detective mystery writers, such as James Lee Burke, P.D. James and Elizabeth George, John Burdett continues to satisfy with a series character who grows with each page-turning novel.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea

The third is the best, as John Burdett returns us to Bangkok and inside the mind of Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep in this followup to two previous journeys of the extraordinary kind.

The same circle of characters is here, his mother who runs the prostitute pick-up bar; his boss, Col. Vikorn of the Royal Thai Police, also a part owner of the bar, and his female FBI friend who arrives from the US to help solve the crime. They are merely props this time to the story of Sonchai's love affair with Damrong and her demise. Sonchai's continuing erotic experiences with her spirit after death drives him all over Bangkok and to Cambodia a couple of times in pursuit of the killers.

Burdett weaves another story of incredible breadth and depth, a mystery based on sex, enlightenment, some Buddhist thoughts, and pure shock to the conventional Western mind. It is so alien, most times, to American thought and Judaic-Christian morality, that this becomes a fantasy travelling in an eroticized fun house.

Although this is best of the series, you might enjoy it better after starting at the beginning, as the character development builds in several directions, especially with regards to his former assistant and his new one, a transsexual soon to undergo the knife.

The Western morality tale is fairly conventional, as the good guys win; but the Eastern morality is not so certain, did the good guys really win?

In his third stellar appearance Bangkok's only incorruptible cop, the devout Buddhist Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who makes ends meet by helping out in his mother's brothel, tracks a depraved but powerful murderer over his canny and corrupt boss' objections.

The story opens: "Few crimes make us fear for the evolution of our species. I am watching one right now." Jitpleecheep has received an anonymous snuff video, which he knows is real, having found the body. The victim is Damrong, a prostitute Jitpleecheep was once madly obsessed with, and who still has the power to invade his dreams in ways that irritate his pregnant wife (also an ex-prostitute) and leave him physically exhausted.

Colonel Vikorn, Jitpleecheep's formidable boss, is mostly impressed with the vast sums porn generates now that it's dispensed by respectable media conglomerates like TimeWarner and AT&T. With his sex industry connections Vikorn sees no reason not to cash in and diverts Jitpleecheep from murder investigator to porn producer.

Undaunted, Jitpleecheep continues to dig, aided by his trans-gender assistant, Lek, and his FBI friend, Kimberley Jones, who becomes obsessed with Lek. But as Jitpleecheep's leads reach into the echelons of the powerful, Vikorn, ever mindful of his own bottom line, takes a personal interest, derailing his subordinate.

The mystery, while shaping the plot, takes a backseat to the roiling stew of Bangkok culture, particularly Buddhism and the human face of the sex trade. Jitpleecheep easily voices seemingly contradictory concepts, most often reconciled by the requirements of third-world survival. Steeped in Buddhist principles, Jitpleecheep beguiles the Western reader even as he playfully exposes the hypocrisy of righteous Western morality. Burdett continues to impress with this unique, atmospheric series.

I'm a fan of this series...even have been gifting the first two to friends. This one disappointed me. Too much of the "same," the only variation the crime. Maintaining a consistent (and distinctive) voice for major series characters is one thing, conceptual and structural redundancy another. Crime procedurals are, for the most part, entertainment not "literature" (see Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson)...so maybe my expectations were too high. Will read the next installment before abandoning the series.

This is a revenge tragedy par excellence. I have not read any of the previous novels by Burdett about this Thai detective. I almost did not get beyond the first chapter of this one after I discovered that the crime involved a snuff movie. I do not enjoy anything pornographic or gruesome. But this was not like that at all. In fact, the tactful way the author kept the details of the movie off stage at first kept me reading, and once I was into the plot I was mesmerized. You do finally get most of the details, but he doesn't dwell on them, primarily because the narrator is so appalled by the thing. It is a good strategy. What is so clever here is the way he is able to weave the supernatural into the story and still keep it real and plausible. The final scene where Damrong wreaks her revenge is just breathtaking.

Simply put, I think it's time Mr. Burdett retired this series. This book was really the same book as Bangkok Tatoo with a new plot. Nothing new is added to the fabric of his characters or the background in Thailand and no new characters are developed, just the same corrupt "farangs" recycled in new form. It was worth reading, but only just. I give it three stars because that's what it would get if I had not read the prior two books in his Bangkok 8 series, but taken with the prior two books I lost interest and almost returned it to the library unfinished. As in the previous two editions of his Bangkok series, Mr. Burdett has great trouble constructing a believable plot resolution. I have rolled my eyes during the last twenty pages or so of each of these books.

John Burdett's "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo" introduced us to Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the cop behind those bright neon bookcovers.

Sonchai is your basic incorruptible and introspective half Thai Buddhist detective in Bangkok. Like a good son, he helps mom run a fairly undistinguished cathouse and generally keeps his hands off the help. A memorable guy in a chaotic, corrupt, and seemingly well-named city.

In "Haunts" Sonchai encounters a hooker who redefines femme fatale, vicious Khmer Rouge mercenaries, a slimey limey lawyer, some murderous elephants, a headcase FBI agent, an American high school teacher in way over his balding head, a drug-dealing Japanese filmmaker released from prison to shoot skin flicks, a bad guy billionaire, and a monk with multiple personalities who hangs out in Internet cafes. Back again are his charmingly corrupt boss Vikhorn, his now pregnant wife, and his pre-op transgendered partner. If you liked Fellini's Satryicon or the bar scene in Star Wars (I did), you will feel right at home.

And what is not to like about the human whitewater of Bangkok? Burdett loves it, as do two other lawyers I know who have retired there to write (hey, if the writer's block gets too tough, there is always high quality, low cost beaches, food, and sex -- so how can you lose?)

You can't -- which is why "Haunts" is a fun summer read, despite Burdett's irritating tendency to patronize westerners and non-Buddhists.

But the story is fantasy, not mystery. It is JK Rowling, not Michael Connelly -- Harry Potter, not Harry Bosch. Sonchai's occidental "intuition" conveniently leads him to the next set of clues. He assumes that people share identical nightmares. Ghosts make random convenient appearances (and are captured on film by the local forensic pathologist, who finds this unexceptional in a cameo appearance as an otherwise normal human being). Our hero's climatic escape from flying demons, KR psychopaths, and elephants trained to torture is the equivalent of polyjuice potion -- a gimmmick that lets the author end the book by cheating his readers.

It's great stuff if you are twelve -- although most books for twelve year olds have fewer snuff flicks, porn kings, and hot sex with ghosts. "Haunts" is the Thai equivalent of a French movie -- perfect if you can live off of characters and scenery but a lot to swallow if you care about the coherence of the story.

John Burdett's first two Bangkok novels introduced us to the sordid universe and morally quixotic inner soul of Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. In "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo," Burdett established himself as a preeminent voice in the crime fiction realm, setting all the action among Thailand's sex tourism industry as seen from Jitpleecheep's point of view as both cop and brothel owner.
Burdett consistently delivers on the promise of supplying a knowledge and detail about the underside of one of the world's most convoluted cities. His Bangkok is a highly stratified place, where the paunchy, middle-aged farang (that'd be us) float like gaudy air mattresses on a deep sea of a Thai culture and economy they will never see, much less understand. But Jitpleecheep and his countrymen get the game very well, and the detective serves as our guide to understanding how Thai spirituality and honor are able to coincide with an economy built on hired flesh, Viagra and booze.
Jitpleecheep wends his way through his duties as detective and helping his mother run the brothel while mollifying his transgender parter Lek, corrupt boss, pregnant wife and, as it turns out in "Bangkok Haunts," the ghost of his former lover, prostitute and man-eater extraordinaire Damrong. A DVD of a snuff film turns up, which depicts a masked man having sex with, then strangling a prostitute. When Jitpleecheep sees it, he's devastated to see it's Damrong, and he sets out to find her killer against the wishes of his boss, the Colonel, and his wife, who's tired of his Damrong-fueled nightmares.
Burdett is a gifted stylist and a natural storyteller, and his first two novels sang along in a delightful river of the exotic and the unknown - virtual guidebooks in their own right to a part of the world one must live in to understand at all. He combines high level police corruption, gang activity and legitimate police work with super-charged sex scenes juxtaposed with workaday sex-job boredom. Enter Jitpleecheep's world for a few chapters and running a brothel seems like a perfectly respectable calling. And you'll be forgiven, farang, for not understanding where the anything-goes part of Bangkok bumps up against the ceiling of tolerance.
"Bangkok Haunts" starts out in similar fashion to the previous novels, with a horrific murder and a whole lot of more-than-meets-the-eye detail. But "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo" were both endowed with wonderful start-to-finish momentum, while the new novel sags in the middle under the weight of everything Burdett is trying to cram in. With the backdrop of Jitpleecheep's personal anguish, we're to understand that the snuff film was created by one of the country's top bankers, in collaboration with Damrong's former husband, an American filmmaker, and Damrong herself. There's a distracting side story about Jitpleecheep having to suddenly oversee the production of porn films at the request of his boss, as well as the mostly unnecessary and largely unexplained presence of a female FBI agent. I'm sure Burdett wanted her there as a foil, a reader's representative to reflect the Byzantine Thai goings-on in an American face, but we never know enough about her character or her motivations to care.
Ultimately, we discover it is Damrong's younger brother, a monk, who is driving the action. Or is it Damrong herself, operating from beyond the grave through a combination of pre-death plans and ghostly manipulations? As he attempts to dive deeper into Thai spirituality, mysticism and superstition, Burdett ends up diluting his tale with twists that may be too fantastic to swallow. Although the climactic scene - which involves young elephants, Khmer thugs, a monk, a ghost and a corpse - is wildly original and profoundly disturbing.
It's not unusual for more creative crime novelists like Burdett to wander out of form in subsequent books, as they try to expand on the well-worn road of whodunit. In "Bangkok Haunts," Burdett takes some high risks that may lose some readers along the way. In the end, though, taking another dip with the author in the underworld of Bangkok is hard to resist, and I'll be on board the next time Detective Jitpleecheep sets out to find a killer.

Working in Bangkok, devoted Buddhist Royal Thai Police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep believes he has witnessed every depravity known to man; but after viewing a snuff film with a twisted ending, the detective is once more appalled by man's inhumanity to man. In Jitpleecheep's third outing (Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo), Burdett offers an inside view of a different reality, a country driven by enterprise without the banal rationalization of Western mentality. Sonchai views the world at large through a perspective of "functional barbarism": greased by advanced technology, our motives are barbaric, driven entirely by greed. With the aid of FBI Agent Kimberley Jones, currently assigned to uncovering the perpetrators of snuff films, Sonchai admits that the woman brutally murdered in the video is Damrong, his former lover. Currently in a healthier relationship with Chanya, a pregnant ex-prostitute, the detective has never quite recovered from a stormy affair with the murdered woman.

Sharing part ownership in the Old Man's Club with his mother, Sonchai supplements his income with long hours at the bar, an accepted practice for most underpaid police. The bar scene is changing, all-nude dancers replacing the tease of strippers, the city's decadence reaching new lows as exhibited in the video. Even the fate of the disturbing snuff film is at risk; Jitpleecheep personally delivers the disk to Agent Jones for retinal analysis lest someone in the Thai police seize an opportunity to sell it on the internet. Third-world countries are infinitely creative when a few dollars profit means survival: "For the poor, birth is the primary disaster." In this case, Sonchai must avail himself of the resources of Colonel Vikorn, the chief of District 8. The corrupt Colonel has much interest in the increasing decadence of the West and its potential.

As the old makes way for the new in a technologically advanced society, the past remains obdurate. Ancestry has its own demands, as does an ancient belief in the ghost world, the faces of the dead crowding out the living. The forensic pathologist doing the autopsy on Damrong spends her off hours filming the antics of this ghost world, a fact Dr. Supatra and Sonchai hasten to obfuscate before the disbelieving farang eyes of Agent Jones. While Agent Jones faces the angst of unrealized and misplaced passion in the katoey world, accepting finally the alternate universe that she discovers in Thailand, Sonchai makes difficult choices, falling from grace for a time, but resurfacing via his enterprising nature. Meanwhile the once-marginalized porn industry, greedily absorbed by corporations, saturates the internet.

In what is both a chilling mystery and indictment of civilization's continuing exploitation of the disenfranchised, Burdett once again captures the essence of Bangkok, corruption balanced with survival. The relentless wheels of commerce roll on, obliterating those who serve as fodder for profit. The bottom line has no conscience, yet the well-meaning continue to actively inhabit their daily lives, incorruptible men like Jitpleecheep fighting to prevail. In the words of the elusive monk, Gamon: "Love is the foundation of human consciousness...It's our constant betrayal of it that makes us crazy." (Note: Do not miss the shocking Appendix.) Luan Gaines/2007.