Synopses & Reviews
Cambodia, 2001 – a country re-emerges from a half century of war, genocide, famine and cultural collapse.
Detective Maier travels to Phnom Penh, the Asian kingdom’s ramshackle capital, to find the missing heir to a Hamburg coffee empire.
As soon as the private eye and former war reporter arrives in Cambodia, his search for the young coffee magnate leads into the darkest corners of the country’s history and back in time, through the communist revolution to the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal who hides amongst the detritus of another nation’s collapse and reigns over an ancient Khmer temple deep in the jungles of Cambodia.
Maier uncovers a tale of mass murder that reaches from the Cambodian Killing Fields back to Europe’s concentration camps. But it is a tale not yet finished and Maier soon realises that, if he is to prevent more innocent lives from being destroyed, he will have to write the last terrifying chapter himself.
Synopsis
Tom Vater is a writer working in South and South East Asia. He writes both in English and German. His articles have been published around the world. He is the author of several books and has co-written a number of documentary screenplays for European television. His books on South Asian themes include two novels, several non-fiction titles, travel guides and photo books, including the acclaimed
Sacred Skin. TIME Magazine described his recent work as "exuberant writing."
Tom's work has appeared in a wide variety of publications--from well-known dailies to specialist magazines--including The Asia Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Marie Claire and Penthouse. Tom is the co-founder of Crime Wave Press (www.crimewavepress.com), a Hong Kong based fiction imprint that endeavors to publish the best new crime novels from Asia and about Asia to readers around the globe.