Customer Reviews

The Earhart Betrayal

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What a good read. Take a CIA type, throw in a few Malay's, some Chinese, a few brit's, a crossdressing Japanese,a fighting Doctor, inebriated a lot of the time and a Jade elephant and you have quite a story. The actual plot has to do with finding the bones of Emelia Earhart but what they find is much more than they thought. Read it you will enjoy it, I certainly did.

"Amelia Earhart's bones brought them to Singapore, to this Bugis Street café to meet the transvestite."

What an opening line. And it just gets better. As terrific as the suspense is, the writing surpasses it. The heat, the stench, the infinite variety of garbage of all sorts including human -- Thayer brings them all off the page to assault the reader. His vivid descriptions keep a raft of characters from three races clear in the mind's eye, and the narration doles out history and social commentary in tidy chunks as the plot progresses. The result is as flawless as the huge jade jewel at the center of much of the action.

And the action is staggering. Amelia Earhart was working for the proto-CIA when she disappeared , betrayed on a mission to gather pre-war intelligence about the Japanese navy. A year after the war, US Agent Joseph Snow looks for her bones in a Malay POW camp. There are no bones. So then he looks for a live woman, not really believing the evidence of his own eyes.

The infinitely corrupt jade dealer who partners with the Soviet Consul, the charming Anglo doctor living in a bottle with his leprosy, the Japanese transvestite trained to kill, these are only the major players who help and confound Snow as he moves from the veranda of the British White Club to the most putrid sewers in Asia, always looking for a fight, always looking for traces of an American legend.

I could barely put the book down. The ending will leave you open-mouthed. Never have so many been betrayed so often by such clever plotting.