Harlan Wolff's Blog: Talk to Harlan Wolff

When I try and remember what it was like to become a teenager in London in the 1970s, the first thing I think of is the iconic triangle and rainbow on the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. My theory was there were two kinds of adults, those who listened to Pink Floyd and […]

The follow up to Bangkok Rules is called A Farewell to Paradise and is available in paperback and Kindle.

Carl Engel has left his private investigation business behind him and is lying low on a tropical island. He has been living on the beach with Nadia, a Russian woman he knows nothing about, and when she's found dead, it's unclear whether it was his past that killed her or her own. Meanwhile, the police think Carl did it and have no interest in looking for other suspects. Carl returns to Bangkok under a cloud of suspicion with his loyal sidekick George, and his investigation takes him from Bangkok’s seedy bars and clubs to Vienna, Bratislava, and Belgrade.

Harlan Wolff has lived in Thailand since 1977 and before becoming a writer was a successful Private Investigator and corporate troubleshooter specialising in major crime. The Carl Engel series is a gritty and real account of a Bangkok based PI’s milieu.

"An exciting page-turner which you can’t put down. Loved it as much as Bangkok Rules and can’t wait for the next book!!" - Hugh Van Es

""Finally, the sequel to Bangkok Rules is here, and it’s literary dynamite! Leaving his life as a private eye behind him, boozy ex-pat Carl Engel is drunkenly lying low on a tropical island. Declared the only suspect in his Russian girlfriend’s brutal murder, Carl heads back to Bangkok to clear his name. It’s been a six-year wait for the second Carl Engel thriller, and now I’m waiting for the third! Mr Wolff’s writing style is fluid and playful. There is no reliance on dry narrative detail or overlong exposition. His characters remain vivid, memorable but most of all believable. The Carl Engel series is top tier crime fiction." - Alex Shaw (Author of Cold Blood)



A Farewell to Paradise

The follow up to Bangkok Rules is called A Farewell to Paradise and is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.

Thank you all for your kind birthday messages, and a special thank you to Ali, Dr Penguin’s son, for his wonderful cartoon of my white Boxer, Alfie. Here are my thoughts on the day, so far: Optimism is hard to find when you wake up one morning and find out you are fifty-eight. It now […]

         My name is Douglas Wilson, but you can call me Dougie. Today is my eightieth birthday, and there isn’t going to be an eighty-first. They’re going to murder me today, right here in Soho. I always knew it would end like this and let’s face it I’ve had a good run. […]

 It was always the full moon that brought people like him to France. He sat rigidly, with his legs dangling through the hole, his feet tugged at by the air current. On the ground, he could see there was fresh snow. Snow meant tracks, and that was never a good thing in his profession. A […]

  “I thought it would have turned out differently,” said the man in the tweed jacket standing at the bar. “What would have turned out differently?” asked the smaller man standing beside him wearing a wrinkled grey suit. “Life of course,” replied the larger man in the tweed jacket. “You mean you could have been […]

My childhood memories are mostly about horses. Not some noble country house with stables, but grimy side-street bookmaker’s shops with discarded betting slips covering the floor like confetti thrown at a doomed marriage. My father had been in the RAF during the Second World War, and it had left him quiet and detached. My father […]

  Book Review: Bangkok Rules by Harlan Wolff by Paul Sean Grieve Rating:   Put the words “private investigator” and “Bangkok” in the same book description and you can be sure your novel will get noticed. You can also be sure your core group of readers will open the cover with with lofty expectations. That’s no […]

  Bangkok Rules …. a Book Review By Kevin Cummings on June 12, 2013 I finished reading Bangkok Rules, recently, the debut novel by Bangkok expatriate, Harlan Wolff. A good, quick read, which I completed in less than 24 hours. It is a familiar but entertaining tale: the hard drinking, cynical private investigator in a […]