Bangkok Haunts

An exotic, intoxicating new novel featuring Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Thai Buddhist detective extraodinaire.

An exciting and fascinating exploration of the underbelly of a totally alien culture.

One of the most startling and provocative mysteries I've read in years.

Cracking East meets West thriller introducing a half-Thai, half-American cop. Terrific

Open Bangkok Tattoo and you will read on and on with wide-eyed fascination, some horror or disgust, and considerable delight

Like no other novel that's come my way lately. Ironic, sexy and trailing an odour that reminds me of a Bangkok street after hours ... Expect to be enlightened

Expertly juggling elements that in lesser hands would become confused or hackneyed, Burdett has created a haunting, powerful story that transcends genre.

Publishers Weekly (starred) for BANGKOK HAUNTS

John Burdett is a former lawyer who worked in Hong Kong until he found his true vocation as a writer. An Englishman by birth, he has lived in France and Spain, and is now back in the Far East. 
His previous novels, Bangkok Eight and Bangkok Tattoo, which also feature Sonchai Jitpleecheep, are also available as Corgi paperbacks. 
For more information on John Burdett and his novels, please visit his website: www.john-burdett.com

Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep has seen just about everything on his beat in Bangkok's crime-riddled District 8. But the terrifying snuff movie he's been sent anonymously is something else: the person who dies is Damrong, the beautiful woman he once loved and whom he still dreams about. 
 
And there's more: slayings turn the ensuing investigation into a murder inquiry, and Sonchai into an obsessed and haunted man. 
 
Sonchai's inquiries follow a dizzying route from his own apartment, where he sleeps next to his pregnant wife while his fantasies deliver him up to Damrong; to the backstreets of Phnom Penh, where street gangs are only the most visible threats; to the gilded rooms of the most exclusive men's club in Bangkok, whose members will do anything to explore their darkest fantasies ...

Bangkok Eight

A startling, unique and provocative novel, hailed by Carl Hiassen, Jeffrey Deaver and James Ellroy as 'suspense at its best; the wildest ride in modern crime exoticum; the last and most compelling word in thrillers.'

'Cracking East-meets-West thriller introducing a half-Thai, half-American cop whose Buddhist beliefs are as important as his forensic skills. Terrific'

'A stunning thriller! Bangkok 8 is suspense at its best: a masterfully written tale set in a world that's perfectly evoked and populated with compelling, flesh and blood characters'

'Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvellously unique, the setting is intoxication and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't put it down'

'Read this book, savor the language - it's the last and the most compelling word in thrillers'

'John Burdett infuses the plot with enough suspense, detail and dry Asian insight to keep readers rapt as the story careens about the bars and brothels of Thailand, taking in its flesh trade and cut-rate plastic surgery parlours and ending in a climax with a fittingly Buddhist twist. Bangkok 8 is highly recommended'

'The real star is Bangkok, a city in mutation, capital of sex and gender surgery, against whose lurid foreground most characters appear puny. It's a strangely tender, Utopian vision...that combines SF clarity with something more fluid, as non-negotiable and irrational as a dream'

'Quirky, talky and highly entertaining... But all this smart talk does not diminish the overwhelming presence of the sprawling, chaotic, illogical city with its jampacked bars and impassable streets, that invigorates this remarkable novel and makes it something to enjoy for its sheer bravado'

'It is not unusual for the Western detective story to be transported into Far Eastern surroundings. But it is the rare novel that offers a seductive and engaging local protagonist of such a story, penned by an Easterner. This does both with resounding success, as well as adding a dimension not typically found in the genre'

'Impeccably researched, this is sometimes poetic, often exotic and totally hardcore'

'Wow! Partly 'normal' thriller and partly off-the-beaten-track Buddhist narrative ... An original and gripping novel'

'John Burdett is purely and simply a wonderful writer, a genuine grown-up at work in a genre mostly populated by arrested adolescents...Bangkok 8 is a tour de force'

'To say that Bangkok 8 in 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... not that the novel is slow going. Bangkok 8 goes from 0 to 60 in about 10 pages'

'Like a modern-day Indiana Jones adventure written by Evelyn Waugh...One of this season's cleverest and most stylish entertainments'

John Burdett is a former lawyer who worked in Hong Kong until he found his true vocation as a writer.An Englishman by birth, he has lived in France and Spain, and is now back in the Far East.He is the author of A Personal History of Thirst and Six Million Seconds. Bangkok Tattoo, the sequel to Bangkok Eight, is also published by Corgi.

In surreal Bangkok, city of temples and brothels, where Buddhist monks in saffron robes walk the same streets as world-class gangsters, a US marine sergeant is killed inside a locked Mercedes by a maddened python and a swarm of cobras. Two policemen - the only two in the city not on the take - arrive too late. Minutes later, only one is alive. 
 
The cop left standing, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is a devout Buddhist and swears to avenge the death of his partner and soul brother. To do so he must use the forensic techniques of the modern policing and his own profound understanding of the mystical workings of the spirit world.Both will be vital as he immerses himself in the moneyed underbelly of Bangkok - where desire rules and where he will eventually find the killer, a predator of an even more sinister variety...

Bangkok Tattoo

John Burdett's extraordinary head-spinning new novel featuring Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Thai Buddhist detective extraordinaire

John Burdett is a former lawyer who worked in Hong Kong until he found his true vocation as a writer. An Englishman by birth, he has lived in France and Spain, and is now back in the Far East. 
 
His previous novel, Bangkok Eight, also features Sonchai Jitpleecheep, and is available as a Corgi paperback.

Bangkok, rich in history and spirituality, crowded with temples, markets and canals, is also a city shrouded in shadows. Polluted, corrupt, infamous as the sex capital of the world, it is a place where wealth, poverty and unimaginable evil walk hand in hand. 
 
In District 8, the underbelly of Bangkok's crime world, a dramatically mutilated body is found in a hotel bedroom. It looks bad: the corpse - who's been flayed - is CIA. And it gets worse when the self-confessed murderer is the beautiful Chanya - the best 'working girl' at The Old Man's Club, a brothel owned jointly by Sonchai's mother and his boss, Police Colonel Vikorn. Alerted by Sonchai, Vikorn quickly concocts a cover-up that involves an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell located in a southern Thai border-town where, since 9/11, the CIA has also had a covert presence. 
 
So far so good: but the truth will be harder to come by, and it will require Sonchai to find an ever more delicate balance between his ambition (western) and his Buddhism (eastern), while he runs the gamut of Bangkok's drug-dealers, prostitutes, bad cops, even worse military generals, and the pitfalls of his own melting heart. 
 
Crowded with astonishing characters, redolent with the authentic, hallucinogenic atmosphere of Bangkok, with needle-sharp observations about the clash of cultures when East meets West, this is a literary thriller like no other.

John Burdett

Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is summoned to investigate the most shocking murder of his career. Solving it could mean a promotion but, still reeling from a personal tragedy, Sonchai is more interested in Tietsin, an exiled Tibetan lama living in Kathmandu. 
 
But there are obstacles in Sonchai's path to enlightenment. Police Colonel Vikorn and Army General Zinna are at war again for control over Bangkok's network of illegal enterprises - and Tietsin has forty million dollars' worth of heroin for sale. 
 
With his life in increasing danger, Sonchai is put to the extreme test in John Burdett's most inventive, darkly comic and wickedly entertaining novel yet.

John Burdett

Books by John Burdett

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