Bangkok 8

Though we know it as Bangkok, the Thai refer to their capital as Krung Thep, which translates as City of Angels. It's an unhappy coincidence. Just like our own City of Angels (Los Angeles), Krung Thep is a once-idyllic city that in recent decades has metastasized into an unwieldy concrete megalopolis. As a result, Bangkok is the perfect setting for that quintessential LA genre, the urban noir. In Bangkok 8, John Burdett takes full advantage.

Burdett's Bangkok is an LA-esque morass of corruption, greed, and cynicism, and his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is no stranger to moral ambiguity. A devout Buddhist who indulges in the methamphetamine-like yaa baa (or "crazy drug"), a police-officer whose greatest vice is honesty, a clean-living moralist who just happens to have a murder in his past, and -- he hopes -- one in his near future, Sonchai is the Thai equivalent of Philip Marlowe (though, admittedly, without the snappy dialogue).

When Sonchai and his beloved partner Pichai are investigating the scene of a grisly murder involving a few dozen drug-addled snakes, Pichai is bitten in the eye by a cobra and dies. Sonchai vows to avenge his partner's death. Unfortunately, he won't be working alone. Because the original murder victim was an American soldier, the FBI becomes involved. Soon enough, Sonchai is working closely with an agent named Kimberly Jones, who not only provides an American foil for Sonchai's Thai ruminations, she injects a little sexual tension into the story as well.

Faithful to the strictures of the genre, as the pair draws closer to the truth, they uncover depravity, greed, and corruption at the highest levels of power. But Burdett has further ambitions. In addition to its hardboiled pedigree, Bangkok 8 is also a classic East meets West novel.

Sonchai is not just morally ambivalent; he is also a cultural mongrel. The son of a Thai prostitute and an American GI he never knew, he has lived in France, Germany, and America and speaks fluent English. In Burdett's hands, he is not only the perfect guide to seedy Bangkok, but provides a running commentary on the East-West divide as well.

If at times Sonchai sounds like he a freshman anthropology text ("There are cultures of guilt and cultures of shame. Yours is a culture of guilt, mine is one of shame.") and at others he gets it flat-out wrong (at one point he states that Thais are much less likely than Americans to offer unsolicited opinions on how someone looks -- I've lived in Thailand and know this to be false), I suspect that these faults won't bother most readers, who will enjoy Bangkok 8 for its colorful characters, its prurient exploration of seedy Bangkok, and its compelling mystery.

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