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Sonchai Jitpleecheep #6
The Bangkok Asset
Sonchai Jitpleecheep, John Burdett's tortured Buddhist detective of the Royal Thai Police Force, has thrilled and charmed readers through the author's five previous Bangkok novels. Now Sonchai's back, struggling to come to grips with the latest horrifying technological innovation to make its way to the streets of Bangkok. It's a conspiracy so big that everyone wants in on the action, not the least Sonchai's corrupt boss Vikorn.
In his latest case, Sonchai is paired with young, female inspector Krom. Like him, she's an outsider on the police force, but she is socially savyy and a technological prodigy. In the midst of a typhoon they witness a deadly demonstration of super-human strength from a man who is seemingly controlled by a CIA operative. Could the Americans really have figured out a way to create some sort of super-soldier who is both physically and psychologically enhanced? Are they testing it, or him, on Thai soil? And why is everyone, from the Bangkok police to the international community, so eager to turn a blind eye?
The case will take Sonchai to a hidden Cambodian jungle compound for aging American vets where he will discover exactly how far a government will go to protect its very worst secrets--both past and present. It is also a case that will shake Sonchai's world to its very foundation and may finally force him to confront his lost father.
From the Hardcover edition.
In his latest case, Sonchai is paired with young, female inspector Krom. Like him, she's an outsider on the police force, but she is socially savyy and a technological prodigy. In the midst of a typhoon they witness a deadly demonstration of super-human strength from a man who is seemingly controlled by a CIA operative. Could the Americans really have figured out a way to create some sort of super-soldier who is both physically and psychologically enhanced? Are they testing it, or him, on Thai soil? And why is everyone, from the Bangkok police to the international community, so eager to turn a blind eye?
The case will take Sonchai to a hidden Cambodian jungle compound for aging American vets where he will discover exactly how far a government will go to protect its very worst secrets--both past and present. It is also a case that will shake Sonchai's world to its very foundation and may finally force him to confront his lost father.
From the Hardcover edition.
307 pages, Hardcover
First published August 4, 2015
106 people are currently reading
760 people want to read
About the author
John Burdett
36 books481 followersJohn Burdett is a novelist and former lawyer. He was born in England and worked in Hong Kong; he now lives in Thailand and France.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 154 reviews
September 18, 2016
It is difficult to know if Burdett is so far out of touch he is creating a science fiction world or if he is so in touch that we are the ones inhabiting a present we know little of. He repeats often during this book that the West has so destabilized itself with its lack of foresight, the corruption of our spirituality or morals, and its support of divisive financial and corporate policy that all is left is for it to collapse into a state of oligarchy, state control, and slavery. The natural outcome of this disintegration are the trans-human creatures he introduces to us in this book: creatures bred to control humans.
All the things we liked about the Burdett series are still there but they are wrapped in this new black packaging. Burdett is funny and insightful. I loved his new character, Krom, a smart, capable lesbian with a full-body tattoo and a fierce libido Burdett has a point when it comes to trans-humans: eventually we are probably all going to be installing little technological aids into our bodies to prevent problems or enhance features…he just jumped the gun a little with his physically perfect though psychologically stunted spawn.
Our beloved Sonchai is struggling with his history. He wants to know who his father is, and for some strange reason his mother has been withholding. In this episode she finally shows him pictures which helps only a little: it was all too long ago and old men often do not resemble their younger selves.
There is a mystery here, but the old police procedural format seems to have gone out the window. This is far more a psychological thriller with super-elements. It is interesting that Burdett chose to call his freaks trans-humans considering we are just going through trans-talk in the States at the moment. One of his Chinese characters, offered a choice of straight, gay, or trans bars, chose trannies as his far-and-away favorite. Perhaps it is the notion of infinitely adaptable human experience? Are we infinitely adaptable?
Speaking of Chinese, there is a strong suggestion of Chinese influence deep in Thai government business, and throughout Southeast Asia, which probably has an element of truth. It would be difficult to imagine they wouldn’t have a great deal of influence, given China’s size, wealth, population, needs, and proximity.
Burdett also reminds us of three U.S. citizens who self-immolated in front of government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. I’d never heard of this. Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison. November 1965. How effectively they were erased.
One reviewer said the book was open-ended, suggesting a further installment in this vein. Perhaps that is true, though I felt Burdett was just offering questions for us all to consider. Who wouldn’t want enhancements of one sort or another? It depends. It depends on what we give up in the process, and what kind of society we eventually want. He has a couple of zinger quotes that seem appropriate to present-day America:
All the things we liked about the Burdett series are still there but they are wrapped in this new black packaging. Burdett is funny and insightful. I loved his new character, Krom, a smart, capable lesbian with a full-body tattoo and a fierce libido Burdett has a point when it comes to trans-humans: eventually we are probably all going to be installing little technological aids into our bodies to prevent problems or enhance features…he just jumped the gun a little with his physically perfect though psychologically stunted spawn.
Our beloved Sonchai is struggling with his history. He wants to know who his father is, and for some strange reason his mother has been withholding. In this episode she finally shows him pictures which helps only a little: it was all too long ago and old men often do not resemble their younger selves.
There is a mystery here, but the old police procedural format seems to have gone out the window. This is far more a psychological thriller with super-elements. It is interesting that Burdett chose to call his freaks trans-humans considering we are just going through trans-talk in the States at the moment. One of his Chinese characters, offered a choice of straight, gay, or trans bars, chose trannies as his far-and-away favorite. Perhaps it is the notion of infinitely adaptable human experience? Are we infinitely adaptable?
Speaking of Chinese, there is a strong suggestion of Chinese influence deep in Thai government business, and throughout Southeast Asia, which probably has an element of truth. It would be difficult to imagine they wouldn’t have a great deal of influence, given China’s size, wealth, population, needs, and proximity.
“War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”The book takes a dog-leg into Cambodia to visit the jungle site of Vietnam-era LSD experiments that sort of fit with the search for Jitpleecheep’s search for his father, but it is so dark and weird that it seemed Burdett wanted to add this to the historical record regardless of whether or not it fit perfectly. Is it true? Again, there may be elements of truth, though it is infuriating America’s secret spy agency would have this kind of reach in a country with which we had no diplomatic relations for at least four years in the 1960’s. Maybe it is folklore kept alive by people Burdett meets in Bangkok—it must be very strange at times in Bangkok with all those old operators hanging around.
Burdett also reminds us of three U.S. citizens who self-immolated in front of government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. I’d never heard of this. Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison. November 1965. How effectively they were erased.
One reviewer said the book was open-ended, suggesting a further installment in this vein. Perhaps that is true, though I felt Burdett was just offering questions for us all to consider. Who wouldn’t want enhancements of one sort or another? It depends. It depends on what we give up in the process, and what kind of society we eventually want. He has a couple of zinger quotes that seem appropriate to present-day America:
“Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation…what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry—but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively…Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand…”I am only marginally sad to lose Sonchai Jitpleecheep to Burdett’s changing fictional world. It seems Burdett is giving us something new, filled with the insights of a lifetime. Thought-provoking.
August 24, 2015
I'm not sure how to review this book.
Bangkok 8, the firs in the series, is one of my all-time favorite books, and I'm fascinated by the character at the center of all these books, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. That's part of the reason: nothing in the series can ever be as good as that first book, and, at the same time, I don't want anything to let me down. I don't want to be _that_ guy: "It's all been downhill since the first book." Certainly the other books have been different, and none could ever be as fresh, but they've been good, nonetheless.
Another problem: John Burdett's writing resonates with the frequency of my brain, short-circuiting so many of the obvious critiques. This is what the best popular culture does, right? However problematic, it slides around our objections and lights up the pleasure centers. Here's this ex-pat Brit writing int eh voice of a half-caste Thai Buddhist cop. He's trying to justify the graft that is endemic in that culture and make sense of the sex industry. For Burdett, it's part tradition, part Thai cynicism, part Thai openness, mixed with a lot of Western neuroses. And so the books simultaneously try to be three things, not all of them supportive of the other: ethnographic (justifications and) explorations of Thai culture; dissections of Western culture by using the trope of the outsider--the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists saw the "savage within" their own culture after spending time in other places, living according to other ways; and the books are of course stories--police procedurals, with Jitpleecheep trying to figure out the who and the how and why. It would be easy enough to tear apart the books, to look at some of the less savory assumptions, to critique the cultural ventriloquism. I get that: my brain just won't really go there. The books satisfy on some deeper level.
Not just popular culture--this is what great art does: becomes a part of us, takes us over. Makes us see the world in a certain way, be in a certain way. Poetry and singing are the easiest example: they inspire--literally--making us breathe in different ways to repeat the lines. It's incredibly intimate. Novels, other art, they have their own ways of worming into our brain and changing us.
Still, I can see that Burdett is up to something very different in this book, whether on purpose or not, I cannot say. Is he tired of the series? Has he pushed the stories to their limit? Maybe he has some bigger plan--but it seems that way. Already by the fourth book in the series, Thailand was obviously feeling too confining to Burdett, and that remains true here. Most of the action is taking place off stage--in Cambodia, and that action is coordinated through outsiders we rarely see, the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans. Thailand is caught in the middle.
Again, there has always been a sense that Burdett's Thailand was not master of its own fate, nor was Jitpleecheep the master of his. That was part of what made the books work: the levels of conspiracy, from the personal to the tactical to the political to the global. Here, though, the conspiracies are taken to the extreme and we only ever see only a few of the proxies, and them mostly briefly.
Jitpleecheep is intensely alone, moreso than in any of the other books I can think of. His mentor, Colonel Vikorn, has been made weak and offers him little help. His wife, Chandra, is drifting away, into her own interests. He has new, feeble connections with the American FBI. The police partners he has are also distant and . . . different in unbridgeable ways. The suspects with whom he deals are either similarly alien or fried out shells from too many drugs. The story ends with him--spoiler, I guess--alone in an underground room while the world changes in incredibly weird--science fictional--ways.
There's more than a little Dostoyevsky here: It's how the Underground Man came to live underground and write his notes.
The story starts off conventionally enough, for a Jitpleecheep novel, with an obscene murder, in this case a girl with her head torn off, easily, seemingly by hand. As the investigation unfolds, Jitpleecheep learns of the existence of super soldiers--mutants, almost in the X-Men sense of the word--being created by governments as a new police force, and the exhibition of these soldiers for sale to other countries.
The books have always been about the way capitalism and the military-industrial complex inscribe their horrors on human bodies--from the sex workers who come to be degraded, to the katoeys and even Jitpleecheep with his very un-Buddhists desires, and how these inscriptions intersect with--our shaped by, and shape--personal histories in all their contingent complexity. This book's focus on mutants seems less extreme in its example than some of the others, or at least less horrific, but the implications are much more vast: it's not just identities that can be changed, or sexes; not just body parts being swapped. An entire new species is being built, one that is not unhuman, but more human--meaning not only better physically and mentally, but also more intensely emotional.
The crime here is solved, easily enough, but it is overwhelmed by the vaster conspiracy, and the book itself never really has a resolution. Most everyone that Jitpleecheep--spoiler, again--meets in the course of his investigations has been enhanced in some way or another, but he refuses, and so finds refuge away from it all. Which is about as anticlimactic ending as possible. And it's not clear where the story can go from here--Burdett has pushed so far into science fiction that any answers to the questions he posed would have to go beyond science fiction and into pure fantasy. How can Vikhorn take on a resurgent China? How can a Thai cop stop transhumanism? The only answer would seem to be a sharp turn, a story orthogonal to this one, accepting its premises but taking it in some other direction, perhaps returning to something smaller scale and more personal.
I can accept the anticlimactic ending; I can respect what Burdett is trying (I think) to do, and how he has pushed his obsessions so far. There is no doubt that this book showcases an authentic vision. It is too weird to be anything else. He roots the story of his supersoldiers--his Captains America--not in World War II, but in Vietnam, and MK Ultra and LSD experimentation. In Burdett's alternative history, the burnouts from the LSD experiments are sent to a jungle compound in Cambodia where they are supervised by a British psychiatrist and LSD proponent, (the too-cleverly named?) Christmas Bride. He and his burnouts have developed a whole, weird social system. They have also been bred, and it is their offspring that formed the first generation of supersoldiers.
As it happens--this bit strains credulity--one of the burnouts is Jitpleecheep's father and the mutants his brother. It is the return of his brother and the chance he might discover his father that has so distressed his mother, and keeps Jitpleecheep from the brothel he co-owns with her. Paradoxically, then, it is learning his family history that makes him even lonelier--keeping him from his brother and cutting out of the stories the prostitutes who form the background of most of the other books. And it's not like there's any compensation, given that his brother belongs to another species and his father is a shell of himself.
Again, I understand what Burdett is trying to do--I think--by rooting this story in the Vietnam War. And the social system that Christmas Bride and his burn outs invent is suitably weird and unsettling, if not fully convincing. The scene of Jitpleecheep experiencing the horrors of that conflict, though, seems pallid. If this was the moment when the military-industrial complex matured, when the secret government took over the running of the world, when the conspiracy was forged; if this is the moment when the monster was born--it needed to be even more horrific, more visceral.
Which is a problem with the book over and over again. There's a feeling of going through the motions--that the giant conspiracy has already been limned in the other stories and here it is being fully revealed, but there's nothing overtly shocking about it. We see Cthullu, but we already guessed at most of its attributes, and the horror is muted; the terror, too, since we always knew it was coming and we would be destroyed. Burdett spends so much time on outlining the conspiracy, on isolating Jitpleecheep, there is no color, no intensity, only a feeling of being broken and alone. Perhaps that was what he was after, and there will be something else to come afterwards.
Just be warned, this book is almost a repudiation of everything that came before in the series, even as it fulfills the logic of the series. The color, the intensity, the swirl, the heartbeat that made the other books alive and vital are not here, This one is brooding, the characters exposed and ineffective. There is no simple, radical Buddhist reversal; no surprise, really, at all. The thumb on the cover is neon and points up. The book inside the cover, the story, it points down, and is all gray.
Bangkok 8, the firs in the series, is one of my all-time favorite books, and I'm fascinated by the character at the center of all these books, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. That's part of the reason: nothing in the series can ever be as good as that first book, and, at the same time, I don't want anything to let me down. I don't want to be _that_ guy: "It's all been downhill since the first book." Certainly the other books have been different, and none could ever be as fresh, but they've been good, nonetheless.
Another problem: John Burdett's writing resonates with the frequency of my brain, short-circuiting so many of the obvious critiques. This is what the best popular culture does, right? However problematic, it slides around our objections and lights up the pleasure centers. Here's this ex-pat Brit writing int eh voice of a half-caste Thai Buddhist cop. He's trying to justify the graft that is endemic in that culture and make sense of the sex industry. For Burdett, it's part tradition, part Thai cynicism, part Thai openness, mixed with a lot of Western neuroses. And so the books simultaneously try to be three things, not all of them supportive of the other: ethnographic (justifications and) explorations of Thai culture; dissections of Western culture by using the trope of the outsider--the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists saw the "savage within" their own culture after spending time in other places, living according to other ways; and the books are of course stories--police procedurals, with Jitpleecheep trying to figure out the who and the how and why. It would be easy enough to tear apart the books, to look at some of the less savory assumptions, to critique the cultural ventriloquism. I get that: my brain just won't really go there. The books satisfy on some deeper level.
Not just popular culture--this is what great art does: becomes a part of us, takes us over. Makes us see the world in a certain way, be in a certain way. Poetry and singing are the easiest example: they inspire--literally--making us breathe in different ways to repeat the lines. It's incredibly intimate. Novels, other art, they have their own ways of worming into our brain and changing us.
Still, I can see that Burdett is up to something very different in this book, whether on purpose or not, I cannot say. Is he tired of the series? Has he pushed the stories to their limit? Maybe he has some bigger plan--but it seems that way. Already by the fourth book in the series, Thailand was obviously feeling too confining to Burdett, and that remains true here. Most of the action is taking place off stage--in Cambodia, and that action is coordinated through outsiders we rarely see, the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans. Thailand is caught in the middle.
Again, there has always been a sense that Burdett's Thailand was not master of its own fate, nor was Jitpleecheep the master of his. That was part of what made the books work: the levels of conspiracy, from the personal to the tactical to the political to the global. Here, though, the conspiracies are taken to the extreme and we only ever see only a few of the proxies, and them mostly briefly.
Jitpleecheep is intensely alone, moreso than in any of the other books I can think of. His mentor, Colonel Vikorn, has been made weak and offers him little help. His wife, Chandra, is drifting away, into her own interests. He has new, feeble connections with the American FBI. The police partners he has are also distant and . . . different in unbridgeable ways. The suspects with whom he deals are either similarly alien or fried out shells from too many drugs. The story ends with him--spoiler, I guess--alone in an underground room while the world changes in incredibly weird--science fictional--ways.
There's more than a little Dostoyevsky here: It's how the Underground Man came to live underground and write his notes.
The story starts off conventionally enough, for a Jitpleecheep novel, with an obscene murder, in this case a girl with her head torn off, easily, seemingly by hand. As the investigation unfolds, Jitpleecheep learns of the existence of super soldiers--mutants, almost in the X-Men sense of the word--being created by governments as a new police force, and the exhibition of these soldiers for sale to other countries.
The books have always been about the way capitalism and the military-industrial complex inscribe their horrors on human bodies--from the sex workers who come to be degraded, to the katoeys and even Jitpleecheep with his very un-Buddhists desires, and how these inscriptions intersect with--our shaped by, and shape--personal histories in all their contingent complexity. This book's focus on mutants seems less extreme in its example than some of the others, or at least less horrific, but the implications are much more vast: it's not just identities that can be changed, or sexes; not just body parts being swapped. An entire new species is being built, one that is not unhuman, but more human--meaning not only better physically and mentally, but also more intensely emotional.
The crime here is solved, easily enough, but it is overwhelmed by the vaster conspiracy, and the book itself never really has a resolution. Most everyone that Jitpleecheep--spoiler, again--meets in the course of his investigations has been enhanced in some way or another, but he refuses, and so finds refuge away from it all. Which is about as anticlimactic ending as possible. And it's not clear where the story can go from here--Burdett has pushed so far into science fiction that any answers to the questions he posed would have to go beyond science fiction and into pure fantasy. How can Vikhorn take on a resurgent China? How can a Thai cop stop transhumanism? The only answer would seem to be a sharp turn, a story orthogonal to this one, accepting its premises but taking it in some other direction, perhaps returning to something smaller scale and more personal.
I can accept the anticlimactic ending; I can respect what Burdett is trying (I think) to do, and how he has pushed his obsessions so far. There is no doubt that this book showcases an authentic vision. It is too weird to be anything else. He roots the story of his supersoldiers--his Captains America--not in World War II, but in Vietnam, and MK Ultra and LSD experimentation. In Burdett's alternative history, the burnouts from the LSD experiments are sent to a jungle compound in Cambodia where they are supervised by a British psychiatrist and LSD proponent, (the too-cleverly named?) Christmas Bride. He and his burnouts have developed a whole, weird social system. They have also been bred, and it is their offspring that formed the first generation of supersoldiers.
As it happens--this bit strains credulity--one of the burnouts is Jitpleecheep's father and the mutants his brother. It is the return of his brother and the chance he might discover his father that has so distressed his mother, and keeps Jitpleecheep from the brothel he co-owns with her. Paradoxically, then, it is learning his family history that makes him even lonelier--keeping him from his brother and cutting out of the stories the prostitutes who form the background of most of the other books. And it's not like there's any compensation, given that his brother belongs to another species and his father is a shell of himself.
Again, I understand what Burdett is trying to do--I think--by rooting this story in the Vietnam War. And the social system that Christmas Bride and his burn outs invent is suitably weird and unsettling, if not fully convincing. The scene of Jitpleecheep experiencing the horrors of that conflict, though, seems pallid. If this was the moment when the military-industrial complex matured, when the secret government took over the running of the world, when the conspiracy was forged; if this is the moment when the monster was born--it needed to be even more horrific, more visceral.
Which is a problem with the book over and over again. There's a feeling of going through the motions--that the giant conspiracy has already been limned in the other stories and here it is being fully revealed, but there's nothing overtly shocking about it. We see Cthullu, but we already guessed at most of its attributes, and the horror is muted; the terror, too, since we always knew it was coming and we would be destroyed. Burdett spends so much time on outlining the conspiracy, on isolating Jitpleecheep, there is no color, no intensity, only a feeling of being broken and alone. Perhaps that was what he was after, and there will be something else to come afterwards.
Just be warned, this book is almost a repudiation of everything that came before in the series, even as it fulfills the logic of the series. The color, the intensity, the swirl, the heartbeat that made the other books alive and vital are not here, This one is brooding, the characters exposed and ineffective. There is no simple, radical Buddhist reversal; no surprise, really, at all. The thumb on the cover is neon and points up. The book inside the cover, the story, it points down, and is all gray.
August 10, 2015
Who doesn't love Sonchai Jitpleecheep?
To Burdett's credit, he is trying to keep his character from getting stale. This novel is quite different from the earlier ones in the Bangkok X series. Regrettably, it falls short. The fundamental plot is Marvellian. There is a lot of LSD in the book, and some of it may have found its way to the creator.
To Burdett's credit, he is trying to keep his character from getting stale. This novel is quite different from the earlier ones in the Bangkok X series. Regrettably, it falls short. The fundamental plot is Marvellian. There is a lot of LSD in the book, and some of it may have found its way to the creator.
September 28, 2015
I have very much liked all of the previous books in this series, but this one lost me. It started with a grotesque murder - nothing new here. But it quickly morphed into an exceptionally convoluted dystopian fantasy that became more off putting with each chapter and ultimately disappeared down its own wormhole. I finally put it down after 250 pages because I really didn't care how it ended.
If you are fascinated by the idea of Transhumans who are either bred or synthesized, or both, (for the US, Chinese and Russian governments) to be a new super warrior race, complete with Enhanced Learning Abilities, and if you are wondering whatever happened to the last veterans of the CIA's Vietnam era ill-fated, LSD fueled MK Ultra project, the this might just be the book for you. But not for me.
If you are fascinated by the idea of Transhumans who are either bred or synthesized, or both, (for the US, Chinese and Russian governments) to be a new super warrior race, complete with Enhanced Learning Abilities, and if you are wondering whatever happened to the last veterans of the CIA's Vietnam era ill-fated, LSD fueled MK Ultra project, the this might just be the book for you. But not for me.
June 15, 2019
Let me start by saying 2 stars is generous, and only because I really liked the ending (assuming I understood it.) This is the sixth book in a series about a Thai detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who has been seeking the identity of his G.I. father, about whom his Thai mother and madam will reveal very little. The Eastern mysticism and openness about sex/sexuality have made this series unusual. This one starts with a horrific murder (a young teenage girl is torn up) intended to engage Sonchai because of a message about his father left by the killer. However, it degenerates into convoluted military fantasy about breeding superhumans/transhumans to be the ultimate weapon for worldwide domination, which interests China, U.S. and Russia. Sonchai becomes a central figure because of his father and .
June 18, 2018
There are five previous novels in John Burdett's Royal Thai series featuring Bangkok police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, and every one of them is strange. The detective is a devout Buddhist (a former monk) and prey to the supernatural fantasies so common in Thailand. In some of the books, he becomes caught up in delusions about demons and other spirits that many rational Western readers are likely to find annoying. I did. (I persisted because the mysteries were otherwise quite good.) But in his latest entry in the series, The Bangkok Asset, Burdett outdoes himself. The plot in this off-beat murder mystery takes readers into the realm of science fiction. The two genres don't mix well here.
This sixth entry in the Royal Thai series opens with a gruesome murder that cannot be explained as the work of any human being. (Take my word for this. You don't want to know details.) It doesn't take long for Sonchai to discover that, in fact, no human did commit this crime. The perpetrator was a transhuman known as the Bangkok Asset. Now, just in case you're unfamiliar with the term, here's what transhuman means in this context: a human being has been "enhanced" in numerous ways through genetic manipulation, drug therapy, and a brain implant to increase his cognitive abilities and physical strength to extraordinary proportions. Achievements of this sort are the stuff of science fiction. Although research in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and genetics points to the possibility that some of this may be realistic several decades in the future, it's not today. Currently, the "enhancements" we observe are limited to such things as prosthetic limbs, primitive gene therapy, and contact lenses. Research into transhumanism today tends to involve questions of ethics and religion at least as much as science. The Pentagon is having wetdreams about creating super-soldiers much like the Bangkok Asset. I'm sure the military in other major world powers is as well.
Folded around this fantasy is a suspenseful mystery story involving several of the characters familiar to readers of the Royal Thai series: Colonel Vikorn, Sonchai's boss and "one of Asia's richest kingpins and a feudal baron of the old kind"; Sonchai's wife, Chanya, a former prostitute with a Ph.D.; and his mother, Nong, the madam who owns a brothel called the Old Man's Club. Burdett introduces a suite of new characters in The Bangkok Asset: Joseph George Goldman, a corrupt, retired CIA officer who controls the Bangkok Asset; Dr. Christmas Bride [sic], the British scientist who pioneered the use of LSD in the CIA's MKUltra mind control program; Inspector Krom, a gorgeous young Chinese-Thai police officer who is tattooed from head to foot and a lesbian; and a Chinese professor with a taste for young transgender Thai men. You see what I mean? This is a very weird book. It's hard to know how Burdett will be able to continue the Royal Thai series. Where can he possibly go from here?
This sixth entry in the Royal Thai series opens with a gruesome murder that cannot be explained as the work of any human being. (Take my word for this. You don't want to know details.) It doesn't take long for Sonchai to discover that, in fact, no human did commit this crime. The perpetrator was a transhuman known as the Bangkok Asset. Now, just in case you're unfamiliar with the term, here's what transhuman means in this context: a human being has been "enhanced" in numerous ways through genetic manipulation, drug therapy, and a brain implant to increase his cognitive abilities and physical strength to extraordinary proportions. Achievements of this sort are the stuff of science fiction. Although research in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and genetics points to the possibility that some of this may be realistic several decades in the future, it's not today. Currently, the "enhancements" we observe are limited to such things as prosthetic limbs, primitive gene therapy, and contact lenses. Research into transhumanism today tends to involve questions of ethics and religion at least as much as science. The Pentagon is having wetdreams about creating super-soldiers much like the Bangkok Asset. I'm sure the military in other major world powers is as well.
Folded around this fantasy is a suspenseful mystery story involving several of the characters familiar to readers of the Royal Thai series: Colonel Vikorn, Sonchai's boss and "one of Asia's richest kingpins and a feudal baron of the old kind"; Sonchai's wife, Chanya, a former prostitute with a Ph.D.; and his mother, Nong, the madam who owns a brothel called the Old Man's Club. Burdett introduces a suite of new characters in The Bangkok Asset: Joseph George Goldman, a corrupt, retired CIA officer who controls the Bangkok Asset; Dr. Christmas Bride [sic], the British scientist who pioneered the use of LSD in the CIA's MKUltra mind control program; Inspector Krom, a gorgeous young Chinese-Thai police officer who is tattooed from head to foot and a lesbian; and a Chinese professor with a taste for young transgender Thai men. You see what I mean? This is a very weird book. It's hard to know how Burdett will be able to continue the Royal Thai series. Where can he possibly go from here?
October 20, 2015
I have been a big fan of John Burdett, ever since his first book, Bangkok Eight. Burdett's writing was fresh, capturing the special mood, feel and smell of Thailand. We were living in Shanghai when Bangkok Eight was published and we had already visited Thailand several times. Reading the book brought back some of our most special moments in this exotic and friendly city: it also taught us a lot we did not know about Thailand and the Thai culture as we followed Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Bangkok police detective and former aspiring Buddhist monk. We lived in Asia for more than a decade, eventually moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong. During that time we traveled throughout Southeast Asia, visiting Vietnam. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, enjoying their different cultures and sights. At the same time, Burdett was expanding the setting for his books into these neighboring countries and even into Hong Kong and mainland China. I looked forward to Burdett's books almost as much as our trips, as he has skill to describe a place in a way that makes you feel like you have been there, and if you have been there, as if you were back again.
His latest book, The Bangkok Asset, has moments where his old writing skills shine through, but unfortunately, to keep the Jitpleecheep series alive, he has had to stretch the plot past reality, into the realm of Sci-Fi. I do not want to spoil the plot for those who may enjoy the story; I will just say that there is an arms race between east and west using physically modified humans as the weapons. Burdett is also very good at creating interesting and vibrant characters, but here too, I believe he has stretched past reason. Just to give one example of such a character: an aging British spy from the Vietnam era whose mind has been baked with drugs through decades of life in the Cambodian jungles and who is a mastermind in the weapons race. His name says it all- Dr. Christmas Bride. To make a so-so book even worse, Burdett has succumbed to the worst form of serialization, leaving the plot unresolved at the end of the book, opening the door to an inevitable sequel.
Burdett is a good writer and if you can get past the assumptions that drive the plot, there is some vintage Burdett style in The Bangkok Asset. His descriptions of Vietnam and Cambodia are superb. The interplay between Sonchai and his wife Chanya is also first class. Maybe it is time to close the Jitpleecheep series. I would look forward to Burdett’s take on modern Thailand, post military coop, or his perspective on China’s increasing involvement in the region. Burdett is such a good, unique writer that I will even read that inevitable sequel, hating myself for doing it the entire time.
His latest book, The Bangkok Asset, has moments where his old writing skills shine through, but unfortunately, to keep the Jitpleecheep series alive, he has had to stretch the plot past reality, into the realm of Sci-Fi. I do not want to spoil the plot for those who may enjoy the story; I will just say that there is an arms race between east and west using physically modified humans as the weapons. Burdett is also very good at creating interesting and vibrant characters, but here too, I believe he has stretched past reason. Just to give one example of such a character: an aging British spy from the Vietnam era whose mind has been baked with drugs through decades of life in the Cambodian jungles and who is a mastermind in the weapons race. His name says it all- Dr. Christmas Bride. To make a so-so book even worse, Burdett has succumbed to the worst form of serialization, leaving the plot unresolved at the end of the book, opening the door to an inevitable sequel.
Burdett is a good writer and if you can get past the assumptions that drive the plot, there is some vintage Burdett style in The Bangkok Asset. His descriptions of Vietnam and Cambodia are superb. The interplay between Sonchai and his wife Chanya is also first class. Maybe it is time to close the Jitpleecheep series. I would look forward to Burdett’s take on modern Thailand, post military coop, or his perspective on China’s increasing involvement in the region. Burdett is such a good, unique writer that I will even read that inevitable sequel, hating myself for doing it the entire time.
February 6, 2017
This novel started off, as most in this series do, with a horrific crime that catapults Sonchai into a complicated web of crime and a murky world of sin and sinister goings_on. To be frank, my first impression was that Burdett was phoning this one in, a notion that was quickly dispelled by the twists and turns of the story.
Without going into the plot too deeply, the concept of transhumanity is introduced and plays a key role in the story. While this is nothing new by any means, the concept is usually encountered in science fiction or poor hybrids of sci-fi and other genres. In the case of this novel, transhumanity, or technologically enhanced human beings, is introduced as a de facto reality, one which will become increasingly a factor in our existence.
I'll admit to being quite intrigued by the concept. Having done very little research, I'm unsure of the extent to which this technology is actually in use, although I imagine current practice is more pharmacological than firmware based. In any case, the novel has left me with the desire to know more about the topic, which makes it a clear success from my point of view.
The novel-to-novel continuity is consistent and, as per Burdett's style, more in line with reality and less so with the neatly wrapped happy ending. I'm looking forward to the next novel, which should be especially interesting given the political events in Thailand that happened after the events of this work.
Without going into the plot too deeply, the concept of transhumanity is introduced and plays a key role in the story. While this is nothing new by any means, the concept is usually encountered in science fiction or poor hybrids of sci-fi and other genres. In the case of this novel, transhumanity, or technologically enhanced human beings, is introduced as a de facto reality, one which will become increasingly a factor in our existence.
I'll admit to being quite intrigued by the concept. Having done very little research, I'm unsure of the extent to which this technology is actually in use, although I imagine current practice is more pharmacological than firmware based. In any case, the novel has left me with the desire to know more about the topic, which makes it a clear success from my point of view.
The novel-to-novel continuity is consistent and, as per Burdett's style, more in line with reality and less so with the neatly wrapped happy ending. I'm looking forward to the next novel, which should be especially interesting given the political events in Thailand that happened after the events of this work.
November 4, 2018
The sixth in Burdett's contemporary Thailand-set mysteries, and this one feels like a series capper (protagonist Sonchai finally finds the truth about his father). C.I.A-sponsored psychotropic shenanigans and hallucinogenic hugger-mugger in 1970s Southeast Asia fuels the story which melds Michael Crichton-like techno thrills with Roland Emmerich's 1992 schlock-buster 'Universal Soldier'. Incredulous, potentially risible, material that nevertheless Burdett makes plausible with the accretion of detail involving the dirty and seamy American activities in that area during and after the Vietnam war years. A rapid, eye-popping read.
August 31, 2020
Half Thai Bangkok cop deals with family issues, mutant soldiers, and a gruesome murder while trying to preserve his inner peace. Enjoyable enough but it felt a little tired in the sixth go round.
May 28, 2016
Definitely a change from previous books - from exploring Southeast Asian traditions to dystopian cyberpunk fare. A lot of the coziness is replaced by alienation, though in a sense there was already a lot of that when one compares the perspective of Sonchai with other Thai people, just see the comments from a more standard Thai person on how their views differ from the way Sonchai looks at things: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In terms of the plot, it does feel a bit shoe-horned when the new background about Sonchai's father is mixed with what we learned in previous books, but I admit it's a bit foolish to expect it to make too much sense. And to those readers that haven't heard of MK-Ultra and its connections with psychedelic "counterculture", it will probably be something interesting to be aware of. Definitely thought-provoking as well, though as Sonchai by the end, the reader is left to find by themselves a "deeper truth" that makes humanity worthy.
The style of the characters is ranty, as usual (don't mind it too much), and as it happens with real humans, of unequal quality. I do like a lot some of the rants about differences of common attitudes to life between different places, but some of the economical doomsaying seems a bit sensationalistic, and general claims about the moral decline of humanity are defensible, but seem to deserve some skepticism in the light of reasonable arguments that say otherwise like the ones in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....
It's also interesting to see how transhumanism goes more and more mainstream in comparison with its niche online circles ~10-15 years ago, even if the technology it talks about doesn't seem to be comparatively panning out.
In terms of the plot, it does feel a bit shoe-horned when the new background about Sonchai's father is mixed with what we learned in previous books, but I admit it's a bit foolish to expect it to make too much sense. And to those readers that haven't heard of MK-Ultra and its connections with psychedelic "counterculture", it will probably be something interesting to be aware of. Definitely thought-provoking as well, though as Sonchai by the end, the reader is left to find by themselves a "deeper truth" that makes humanity worthy.
The style of the characters is ranty, as usual (don't mind it too much), and as it happens with real humans, of unequal quality. I do like a lot some of the rants about differences of common attitudes to life between different places, but some of the economical doomsaying seems a bit sensationalistic, and general claims about the moral decline of humanity are defensible, but seem to deserve some skepticism in the light of reasonable arguments that say otherwise like the ones in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....
It's also interesting to see how transhumanism goes more and more mainstream in comparison with its niche online circles ~10-15 years ago, even if the technology it talks about doesn't seem to be comparatively panning out.
August 28, 2015
Okay, this ain't the same Sonchai Jitpleecheep that you may have encountered in the previous books in Mr. Burdett's Bangkok series (maybe a distant cousin to the guy in "Vulture Peak, or maybe not) and for sure it isn't Kansas anymore. This is a whole different kettle of genres - and I am not sure which one it fits into; Hard-Boiled isn't it and I am pretty sure Science Fiction isn't exactly correct either. I guess I'll label it post-historical-social-criticism and note that the names, dates and places all ring a bell in the recesses of my memory.
The issue this time around isn't so much about crime as morality(which as always is subjective), or perhaps the weight of a soul. The Bangkok series has always been a tad off-kilter in relationship to good, evil, black and white with tons of farang gray in between so this book sorta fits into the canon but be forewarned that this time there are no cops and robbers per se and we are here to address cosmic issues (bring your own lama and/or monk along)such as how to cook THC oil into Marlboro Reds, the heavy stuff only.
The New World Order is coming, we have seen the future, you've been warned and y'all better be ready.
Remember, the oven is not to be over 100 degrees or you'll fry the oil
The issue this time around isn't so much about crime as morality(which as always is subjective), or perhaps the weight of a soul. The Bangkok series has always been a tad off-kilter in relationship to good, evil, black and white with tons of farang gray in between so this book sorta fits into the canon but be forewarned that this time there are no cops and robbers per se and we are here to address cosmic issues (bring your own lama and/or monk along)such as how to cook THC oil into Marlboro Reds, the heavy stuff only.
The New World Order is coming, we have seen the future, you've been warned and y'all better be ready.
Remember, the oven is not to be over 100 degrees or you'll fry the oil
August 13, 2015
I'm reeling. Have loved some of the previous five, but this one blew my head off. A sort of sci-fi psychological thriller with a Buddhist base--except the premise and products are true! The characters are, as always in this series, unforgettable, while Bangkok and other nearby places are alive and the plot is easy to follow and thrilling and scary. I hope devout Christians do not take the invoking of Jesus crosswise, it's not disrespectful, but points up, well, the point. The drama of it means something big and dreadful is going on. And the writing is superb. Every sentence worth a re-read. But no time, I only wanted to keep reading, what happens next?!
And Chapter 34, just read Chapter 34.
And Chapter 34, just read Chapter 34.
August 26, 2015
Burdett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep books keep getting better. Different from earlier novels in the series, The Bangkok Asset takes Sonchai, and readers, where they haven't been before. Like Marcus Sakey's "Brilliance," "The Bangkok Asset" is about humans with superhuman powers, the effect those powers have on the people who wield them, and the effect these "enhanced" humans have on society. But while Sakey's book is set in the near-future and requires a leap of faith to accept the premise, Burdett's novel is set in the present and is all the more chilling for its plausibility. Like "Brilliance," "The Asset" ends with room for a sequel or two. I can't wait.
October 26, 2015
A very good book for the conspiracy minded, and a creepy addition to the Sonchai Jitpleecheep storyline, although one wonders if this means there are no more books in this series, because major questions were addressed. although perhaps it sets the stage for a new direction. Although I thought it was interesting, it was also tiring, and perhaps even a bit too fantastical for my simple mind. Still I have enjoyed these books and likely will pick up the next when it arrives.
September 6, 2015
Terrible, just terrible. I made it 3/4 of the way through and then bailed.
Started off in a promising way, then "The Asset" took off into the jungle and devolved into an LSD trip complete with a bunch of aging cannibal hippies with a secret -what happened to their babies? Ummm, don't care. Bummed because I've enjoyed the other Sonchai Jitpleecheep mysteries.
Oh, well, can't win 'em all.
Started off in a promising way, then "The Asset" took off into the jungle and devolved into an LSD trip complete with a bunch of aging cannibal hippies with a secret -what happened to their babies? Ummm, don't care. Bummed because I've enjoyed the other Sonchai Jitpleecheep mysteries.
Oh, well, can't win 'em all.
April 23, 2018
Why Lek was not in this one, goddamnit! Did I miss something?
August 8, 2017
I've enjoyed the previous 5 installments of this series. # 5 perhaps as much, if not more than the previous 4 novels.
The Bangkok Asset is quite different in at least one respect & based on it's ending, the story goes on from this book. I don't know if i would continue with this series if there was a #7. I like to feel i have finished a story, not have it go on interminably. Still this was enjoyable.
How it differed from the previous five novels, was that it almost crosses over into Science Fiction, in that the story involves "Enhanced Humans" or Super-Humans & the race by the super powers to be the first to develop this technology. Sonchai finds himself cast into this story, with a possible personal link, to the identity of his 'farang' or American father.
In a way this series could be seen as a continuation of 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene. Only in the sense that Americans (or Westerners in general) fail to comprehend the Buddhist mindset of (in this case Thais), but try to bend it into something that they can deal with based on their own mind view. Sometimes these 'failures' result in hilarious dialogue and situations.
"Haven't you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it needs men and women of mature judgement it seems there aren't any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation."
The Bangkok Asset is quite different in at least one respect & based on it's ending, the story goes on from this book. I don't know if i would continue with this series if there was a #7. I like to feel i have finished a story, not have it go on interminably. Still this was enjoyable.
How it differed from the previous five novels, was that it almost crosses over into Science Fiction, in that the story involves "Enhanced Humans" or Super-Humans & the race by the super powers to be the first to develop this technology. Sonchai finds himself cast into this story, with a possible personal link, to the identity of his 'farang' or American father.
In a way this series could be seen as a continuation of 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene. Only in the sense that Americans (or Westerners in general) fail to comprehend the Buddhist mindset of (in this case Thais), but try to bend it into something that they can deal with based on their own mind view. Sometimes these 'failures' result in hilarious dialogue and situations.
"Haven't you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it needs men and women of mature judgement it seems there aren't any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation."
June 26, 2018
I've liked all the John Burdett Bangkok series. And I think that Burdett is entitled to take the series in a different direction: deeper and more speculative than the usual 'you won't believe what happens in Bangkok' crime thriller. Just this morning, I read an article about how China is seeking total dominance in the realm of artificial intelligence. Weaving the damaged American soldiers of Viet Nam into the narrative, IMHO, was clever. This is fiction with deep issues and potential outcomes to chew on, over time.
The most heartbreaking part of the book was around Sonchai's search for his biological father, and how that turned out. No spoilers--but the entire book was a kind of debate on 'nature vs. nurture' (vs. enhancing nature). It gave me a lot to think about--a more far-ranging look at human nature.
Four stars.
The most heartbreaking part of the book was around Sonchai's search for his biological father, and how that turned out. No spoilers--but the entire book was a kind of debate on 'nature vs. nurture' (vs. enhancing nature). It gave me a lot to think about--a more far-ranging look at human nature.
Four stars.
April 24, 2022
As of 2022, the Sonchai series doesn't have a seventh entry, so I am taking this to be the final volume. And what a letdown this one was. For a series that started out strong, and knowing that this was the last one, I was expecting much more. Instead, the detective finds himself in a borderline science fiction tale where he is more observer than actor. The plot is far fetched, characters form the main series make appearances without making any lasting impressions, and to top it all off, the end may be one of the biggest fizzles I have read. The closest thing I can liken it to is the feeling I had when I watched the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time, and the emptiness that I felt when I was denied a slapstick-laden battle and was instead given an anticlimax arrest without any further explanation or credits.
Perhaps Burdett attempted to send a message by walking away from the series that he was out of ideas, or wanted to move on to new pursuits. A pity that he left us wondering how such a series could have ended. Burdett does, however, get a second star for his gritty noir narrative voice. At least that survived through to the end.
Perhaps Burdett attempted to send a message by walking away from the series that he was out of ideas, or wanted to move on to new pursuits. A pity that he left us wondering how such a series could have ended. Burdett does, however, get a second star for his gritty noir narrative voice. At least that survived through to the end.
August 24, 2015
This series is usually classified as crime/mystery fiction, but this book is so much more. Sonchai Jitpleecheep is the endlessly fascinating protagonist, a half Thai, half farang, scrupulous cop first-person narrator whose mother runs a brothel and whose father has been a mystery. Here we encounter a new partner Krom and Sonchai's brother, both of whom turn out to be transhumans part of a new arms race as well as a colony of 60's acid casualties hidden away in the Cambodian jungle. This book is wildly inventive and well written, only its somewhat weak resolution prevented me from giving it 5 stars. It seems to have taken Burdett 3 years to produce it. I hope that our next wait is not that long.
December 10, 2015
Another strange one in this series that morphs into science fiction and horror. The laid back but intrepid Sonchai meets Frankenstein in the flesh and descends into a heart of darkness in the Cambodian jungle. The ending leaves you wondering where exactly the next adventure in the series will go.
August 26, 2017
I usually really like Burdett's Bangkok series, despite the fact that they are a little bazaar. However, this one only just makes it to 3 stars for me, partly because it seems to finish without a real ending. At the end it just stops without drawing anything together.
August 18, 2015
Ugh. I love this author and his main character (this is #6 in the series) but this book was really not good.
March 2, 2016
"You have a job that makes you real. I don't, that makes me a ghost. Let's leave it at that". Chanya.
January 24, 2023
The first book in this series, Bangkok 8, was like candy for me. I like crime fiction. The detective in this story was an American/Thai Buddhist "Arhat" named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. I'm so used to American crime fiction, that this book was very much took me to places that I had not previously encountered. I actually learned a huge amount about Thai culture and Buddhism. It was amazing to be reading a very well-written and interesting international crime story and learning about cultures and religions I was unfamiliar with at the same time. Unfortunately, now approaching the end of the series of novels, it has gotten a bit stale, and the revelations associated with learning new things are no longer available in The Bangkok Asset.
Some of the same characters are there: Sonchai's wife and his mother and his boss. They are all fantastic characters. The Asset, however, has a couple of things that create some problems. The plot travels to a pretty dark and depressing place in Cambodia to study the Asset's origin story. And then there is the category of person the Asset belongs to: transhuman. Not trans in the gender sense that we understand from modern gender history. But transhuman in the sense of a human that is part machine-mechanical-software, and part homo sapien. It is some unfortunate timing perhaps that the title transhuman was bestowed on the Asset, but that is the choice that was made. I admit that every time I read the term I was a little put off, even if it was descriptive of the Asset's physical characteristics.
It's still a page turner. It still has a bunch of the great characters from the previous novels. But it feels a little shopworn at this point. I was left hoping to find out more about Sonchai's Buddhist practice, and his life with his mother and wife (and the place the brothel holds in their lives). Unfortunately, the story bends hard toward a kind of Frankenstein created apparently by shadowy intelligence organizations operating in southeast Asia. They are still treating the area as a place to play out their war games without much blowback from the locals, while keeping the homeland safe. It's a disgusting move that needs to end.
I can highly recommend the first two books in the series, Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo. This one, not so much.
Some of the same characters are there: Sonchai's wife and his mother and his boss. They are all fantastic characters. The Asset, however, has a couple of things that create some problems. The plot travels to a pretty dark and depressing place in Cambodia to study the Asset's origin story. And then there is the category of person the Asset belongs to: transhuman. Not trans in the gender sense that we understand from modern gender history. But transhuman in the sense of a human that is part machine-mechanical-software, and part homo sapien. It is some unfortunate timing perhaps that the title transhuman was bestowed on the Asset, but that is the choice that was made. I admit that every time I read the term I was a little put off, even if it was descriptive of the Asset's physical characteristics.
It's still a page turner. It still has a bunch of the great characters from the previous novels. But it feels a little shopworn at this point. I was left hoping to find out more about Sonchai's Buddhist practice, and his life with his mother and wife (and the place the brothel holds in their lives). Unfortunately, the story bends hard toward a kind of Frankenstein created apparently by shadowy intelligence organizations operating in southeast Asia. They are still treating the area as a place to play out their war games without much blowback from the locals, while keeping the homeland safe. It's a disgusting move that needs to end.
I can highly recommend the first two books in the series, Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo. This one, not so much.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 21, 2018
All Reviews in One Place: Night Mode Reading; LT
About: A person is brutally murdered, their head torn off their shoulders with demonic strength. And a message is left for Sonchai at the crime scene, written in blood: “I know who father is“. To help him with this case, yet another one that directly revolves around him, a Chinese inspector Krom is assigned to Sonchai. And she soon confirms Sonchai’s suspicion that there’s something inhuman at work here.
The deeper Sonchai gets, the closer he gets to his father, with whom killer baited him closer, deeper into the case, the more he realizes that the world as he knew it has long as ended. This is the new era, era where the only power, respect, and religion is money. The second coming or the apocalypse itself is at the gate. And Sonchai is to choose a role: will you be John the Baptist, or Judas?
Mine: Some of the characters simply disappeared. Everyone forgot about them completely, and it’s really annoying. Especially since the new ones were very basic one-sided, and lacked any depth. The author is really struggling to write any women, and the ones that he does write, end up becoming either lamps or one-tune sounds. Then there’s the whole “every case revolves around Sonchai” deal. People need to stop killing to get his attention. Ending was pretty great though, not the very far end, but the culmination of it, before Sonchai jumped the bathroom. It put the other books together: you had a man whose word was always valued, a man who was loved even when he was hated, a man who was a saint, finally, become a saint. This new Cult, these New Age Apostles, they reach their hands to him with a promise: come, we’ll love you, just sit on the throne, and be our God.
In Lithuania we only have three books translated for us, and I think that was a good call on the publishers. The first three books really tie up the good story with the “happily ever after” attached to it. The rest are darker, and by far, not always good. Yet I don’t feel like I wasted time reading these, they were worth it, even when I hated it. So all in all, final book gets a 4 out of 5 from me.
About: A person is brutally murdered, their head torn off their shoulders with demonic strength. And a message is left for Sonchai at the crime scene, written in blood: “I know who father is“. To help him with this case, yet another one that directly revolves around him, a Chinese inspector Krom is assigned to Sonchai. And she soon confirms Sonchai’s suspicion that there’s something inhuman at work here.
The deeper Sonchai gets, the closer he gets to his father, with whom killer baited him closer, deeper into the case, the more he realizes that the world as he knew it has long as ended. This is the new era, era where the only power, respect, and religion is money. The second coming or the apocalypse itself is at the gate. And Sonchai is to choose a role: will you be John the Baptist, or Judas?
Mine: Some of the characters simply disappeared. Everyone forgot about them completely, and it’s really annoying. Especially since the new ones were very basic one-sided, and lacked any depth. The author is really struggling to write any women, and the ones that he does write, end up becoming either lamps or one-tune sounds. Then there’s the whole “every case revolves around Sonchai” deal. People need to stop killing to get his attention. Ending was pretty great though, not the very far end, but the culmination of it, before Sonchai jumped the bathroom. It put the other books together: you had a man whose word was always valued, a man who was loved even when he was hated, a man who was a saint, finally, become a saint. This new Cult, these New Age Apostles, they reach their hands to him with a promise: come, we’ll love you, just sit on the throne, and be our God.
In Lithuania we only have three books translated for us, and I think that was a good call on the publishers. The first three books really tie up the good story with the “happily ever after” attached to it. The rest are darker, and by far, not always good. Yet I don’t feel like I wasted time reading these, they were worth it, even when I hated it. So all in all, final book gets a 4 out of 5 from me.
September 21, 2020
I have read this Bangkok series because of my own personal history. In 1967-68 I was fortunate to travel throughout Southeast Asia and study at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. This was at the height of the Vietnam war, just before the Tet Offensive. I fell in love with the culture and the city, but had to witness first hand the growth of the sex trade / exploitation due to 10,000 R&R troops in and out of Bangkok every week. Many of the beggars on the street were young girls with mixed race infants. Most of the American airbases were in Thailand. There were entire multi-story hotels just for American officers. We were the only undergraduate study group in Southeast Asia at the time outside of Japan. We traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and throughout Thailand. I remember standing at the current bridge over the River Kwai after visiting cemeteries with thousands of British, Australian, and other soldiers that died building the death railroad toward China in WWII As we stood contemplating the tremendous losses of that war three American phantom jets flew over heading for Vietnam. I remember thinking that we never learn.... I know I can never return to my Bangkok, but with this series I was able to travel down familiar streets and remember customs and food. Loved the roti!!! That said, until this book I have enjoyed the series. Songchai Jitpleecheep is a great detective. This entire story line of the CIA involvement of perfecting superhumans or trans-humans was disgusting to me, although they are a difficult group to trust and we saw the planes of Air America ( CIA ) everywhere we traveled. Although I recommend the series until this book, I absolutely hated this edition. Kristi & Abby Tabby
October 5, 2018
This is unlike any cop story that I've ever read.
It's about a Buddhist detective on the Royal Thai Police Force, Sonchai Jitpleecheep.
He's highly-intelligent, a bit of an outsider and has a penchant for smoking weed.
He has a lifelong obsession with finding his father, an American GI serving in Viet Nam and on R&R when he meet Sonchai's mom, a prostitute. Sonchai is half-caste. He has issues.
While investigating the savage beheading of a young girl, Sonchai is paired with enigmatic female inspector Krom for another assignment. You'll find out why as you read on.
Their case involves a man named Goldman. He's retired CIA and is running a program dealing with superhuman Assets with the goal of selling his "invention" to the Chinese and creating an army of super-soldiers.
It borders on fantasy.
This is a creative and philosophical story about the future and enhanced human beings.
It' s crazy and good.
There's LSD and the CIA's mind control experiments of MKUltra (still going on). There's government conspiracies, greed and corruption in highest echelons of power including Sonchai's boss, Colonel Vikron. A trip to a weird jungle installation. A mad scientist. And...trans-humans.
Surprisingly, all this has a connection to the detective's father!
Reads like a fever dream. I enjoyed it.
It's about a Buddhist detective on the Royal Thai Police Force, Sonchai Jitpleecheep.
He's highly-intelligent, a bit of an outsider and has a penchant for smoking weed.
He has a lifelong obsession with finding his father, an American GI serving in Viet Nam and on R&R when he meet Sonchai's mom, a prostitute. Sonchai is half-caste. He has issues.
While investigating the savage beheading of a young girl, Sonchai is paired with enigmatic female inspector Krom for another assignment. You'll find out why as you read on.
Their case involves a man named Goldman. He's retired CIA and is running a program dealing with superhuman Assets with the goal of selling his "invention" to the Chinese and creating an army of super-soldiers.
It borders on fantasy.
This is a creative and philosophical story about the future and enhanced human beings.
It' s crazy and good.
There's LSD and the CIA's mind control experiments of MKUltra (still going on). There's government conspiracies, greed and corruption in highest echelons of power including Sonchai's boss, Colonel Vikron. A trip to a weird jungle installation. A mad scientist. And...trans-humans.
Surprisingly, all this has a connection to the detective's father!
Reads like a fever dream. I enjoyed it.
July 11, 2021
Philosophically, this book is one of the deeper stories that John Burdett wrote in his Sonchai Jitpleecheep series. It followed the thread of Buddhism better than any of the other novel, and I could really see the connection the main character had to that religion. Story wise, one of the weaker installments. There never seemed to be a reason why Sonchai was in the story except to have stuff happen around him, so John Burdett could make the points that he wanted to make. As a detective, he was never a great one, and this was the worst detective work I had ever seen in a story. In fact, I can't think of any investigation that went on throughout the course of the story. Instead, Sonchai, the protagonist, was drug along from one place to another as the big mystery unraveled around him. It made him an even more passive character which I did not believe was possible. He only had one choice to make in the story, and that happens in the last chapter, and I was not satisfied how he handled that decision. I can see why this was the last book that John Burdett published in this series, and I think it gave him a good reason to finally hang up the old typewriter and move on to something else that might inspire him more.
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