Another excellent addition to this exciting series. Great characters. I've become attached to Poke, Rose and their daughter and some of the secondary characters as well. All three books have been gritty page-turners. The subject matter is usually tough but handled well. I always get wrapped up in...
In this next entry in Timothy Hallinan's highly praised series, private investigator Simeon Grist trails a serial killer whose methods appear to be based on an ancient Chinese legend.
Poke Rafferty was writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored when Bangkok stole his heart. Now the American expat is assembling a new family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and Miaow, the tiny, streetwise urchin he wants to adopt. But trouble in the gui...
Another Simeon mystery that I could not put down. I love books that mix murder and religion. That is one reason I really like this series. I have read half of the series so far and I can't wait to start the next book. Unfortunately, I skipped around in the series and started with the last one fir...
When Simeon Grist is hired by a recording company to trail suspected embezzler Sally Oldfield, he discovers she's involved in something far more lucrative than CDs--namely, a multi-million-dollar religious scam. And Grist's snooping makes him a prime target for hell . . . .
Hired to keep Toby Vane, prime-time's number one leading man, out of trouble, Simeon Grist is certain the job will be a piece of cake--that is, until Vane is framed for the murder of a nude dancer.
Raging underneath the high-profile headline crimes that throw a community into uproar are the back-alley wars that really control the pulse of a city. In his latest adventure, Simeon Grist, with his hard edge and sharp wit, takes up his own battle with a set of criminals who are the scourge of th...
And it’s not solely because she’s bigger, although she’d been surprised, when she first sat down, by the fact that her knees folded so sharply and were too high for her to cross her arms on, the way she used to do. The pavement is harder, too. Even though she’s gained all the weight that almost t...
He raises both hands, gesturing for silence. The fiddlers desist. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Pan says. “On behalf of the Malaria Relief Fund, I want to thank you all for coming and invite you out into the garden for our closing presentation. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.” He steps down and wea...
All the frailty, all the vagueness, all the fretfulness, all the tremors—all the palsies and neural misfires and cosmetic damage he’d been holding at bay all these years—had joined forces and knocked him sideways. He sat on the enormous couch, folded forward over another bright pair of golf slack...
Jake, looking fairly relaxed for someone who was as wired as the phone company, was stretched out in his butter-colored leather armchair in front of the giant fireplace, in which Casey had built a very businesslike fire as a hedge against the house’s air-conditioning. From time to time, she aband...
Tiffle to Dexter as a white man. Claude Tiffle had virtually no color at all. He looked like something that had evolved underground: eyes as pale and soiled as mushrooms, hair like alfalfa sprouts, a sparse mustache that looked like a scraggle of centipede's legs. Fat, wet, white lips it was easy...
Bits and pieces of what happened will stay with him, hard and flashbulb bright, sharp-edged and fragmentary as reflections in bits of a broken mirror. Snapshots in a loose pile, random and unsequenced. Maybe, he will think, it is better that he remembers it that way. Better he doesn’t have to car...
Most of them were off, in deference to the wintry Easter climate, but a few pumped valiantly away. The motel was arranged in a U around the parking lot, and as we pulled Alice into a spot I looked up. Three of the twelve doors were open. In each of them, a very large man sat. Two of them were bla...
Dr. Ratt once told him that the doctors who drive his cars have all had what he described as “a little trouble” in their careers, or else they’d be working in some nice clean hospital that doesn’t go anywhere instead of driving around Bangkok all day. If they get fired from this job, they’ll be p...
The two girls sit there, still as a painting, wrapped in the chirping and thrumming from the creek bed. At last Kwan says, over the noise, “Before you say anything else, I want an answer to my question.” Nana pulls out another cigarette, raises it halfway to her lips, and says, “You’ve asked a lo...
I wondered how Limpopo was this time of year. It had to be better than the Valley, which was suffocating. It couldn’t have been hotter if the sky had been a big brown electric blanket set to high—brown because the inversion layer, which I understand intermittently, had slammed its lid on top of t...
It was a little after 1 A.M., and I had the roads pretty much to myself. After making the turn off of Ventura, I pulled to the curb, opened the trunk, grabbed everything I might need, and dropped it into the little black leather satchel I use for what I think of as house calls. Then I put the Toy...
Trey said, her hands folded in front of her, her back plumb-straight. We were back in the classroom set, facing each other over the teacher’s desk, and she was the image of the strict third-grade teacher who’s just found a bad word on the chalkboard. I suppose I was expected to feel chastened, bu...
In Thai, Rafferty says, “Why don’t you get out and switch them?” “I’d get wet,” the driver says, steering around a bus and missing it by a couple of coats of paint. “Better than being killed.” “I am very good driver,” the dri...