The Queen of Patpong
A Poke Rafferty Thriller
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Hallinan is a wordsmith of the first order, and he puts his great narrative skills into overdrive on this one….You won’t read a better thriller this year!”
—John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Treasure Hunt
Author Timothy Hallinan returns to Bangkok, Thailand—and plunges his protagonist, travel writer Poke Rafferty, into graver peril than ever before—in The Queen of Patpong, Hallinan’s fourth Rafferty thriller following A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water. Fans of John Burdett, Alexander McCall Smith, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst who love being transported to exotic locales will be riveted when a nightmare figure from the past arrives at Poke Rafferty’s door to bring chaos and danger to the lives of the people he loves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallinan's compassionate fourth Poke Rafferty thriller (after Breathing Water) finds Poke and his live-in girlfriend, Rose, finally married, but a specter from Rose's past as a dancer on Bangkok's notorious Patpong Road comes back to haunt her. As a na ve country girl named Kwan, Rose fell for the charms of American Howard Horner, never suspecting that Horner's true interest in her involved something far darker than romance. Long thought dead, sly predator Horner is back in Bangkok to stalk Rose and all who are dear to her. Hallinan uses the menace Horner represents to springboard into a sympathetic depiction of Rose's life, revealing without condescension how a simple farm girl decided that the least bad of all the unappealing options open to her was to offer herself to a parade of strangers for money. Rafferty neither idolizes nor demonizes Bangkok's sex workers, instead casting an empathetic but incisive eye on a class of people often reduced to mere caricature.
Customer Reviews
Felt right at home in Silom reading this story
Queen of Patpong is a great read. I've stayed in Bangkok many times. Several of those times were just off Sathon Rd. in the Silom neighborhood. I didn't feel like I was reading a fictional story at all except for what took place in the story out on the waters of the Andaman Sea.
Hallinan is a great story teller, both from a man's and a woman's point of view. I would urge the reader not to lose sight of the fact that many, many young Isaan women come to the big cities of Thailand and take "respectable" jobs and lead ordinary, respectable lives. They all do not end up as bar girls.
I salute the author for not reaching low down and referring to the Thai bar girls as LBFM's. Yes, they can be greedy and often larcenous, but they are also very brave young women and ever so generous of heart and dedication to the welfare of their families. Now it's on to Book #2 in the series. I'm hooked Tim!