Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...BANGKOK 8, by John Burdett (Knopf; 318 pages...
...Bangkok 8 is set in Bangkok is an understatement: it is suffused with the cooking smells, mired in the traffic jams and entangled in the bare limbs of the sex workers of Bangkok. Not that the novel is slow going. Bangkok 8 goes from 0 to 60 in about 10 pages, where 60 is a cop dying after he gets bitten by a cobra. Bitten in the eyeball. By a cobra that's high on meth...
That's the crime, or one of them anyway. Our sleuth is a low-grade Bangkok detective named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Jitpleecheep is a devout Buddhist, and his firm belief in reincarnation and the transience of the physical world colors every aspect of his investigation. "We do not look on death the way you do, farang," he tells us, using the Thai word for foreigner. "Would you be sorry about a sunset?" Jitpleecheep is also half American and half Thai, which makes him uniquely qualified to understand both the tourists lured by the promise of sex, money, drugs and contraband jade...
...with anti-American demonstrations in its aftermath. Last October, bombs in Bali killed 202 people and wiped out much of what was left of tourism there. By early 2003, Burma was a recrudescent human-rights disaster; more than 2,000 drug suspects were gunned down in the streets of Bangkok, and Cambodians went on a violent rampage against the Thai. Armchair audiences overseas might as well have contemplated a holiday in hell...
Chatuchak will deter even the most confident shopper, so reliable intelligence is a must. Before venturing into the labyrinth, make an investment in the quirky, illustrated map of Bangkok by Nancy Chandler. It features a detailed ground plan of Chatuchak and with it you might?just might?make it back to the hotel bar with most of your faculties intact. The map is widely available for 140 baht ($3.50) at Asia Books and Bookazine stores throughout the city, or via nancychandler.net...