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| Bangkok Haunts | 
 enlarge | Author: John Burdett
Publisher: Corgi Adult
Category: Book
Buy Used: $8.90
Used (6) from $8.90
Avg. Customer Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 3449321
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0552153591
EAN: 9780552153591
ASIN: 0552153591
Publication Date: May 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New! Immediate Shipment!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...
 Jitpleecheep Rides Again!!! June 13, 2007
24 out of 32 found this review helpful
I loved John Burdett's "Bangkok 8" and "Bangkok Tattoo" thus was anxiously awaiting, "Bangkok Haunts", and I was not disappointed. In many ways, these novels get better and better. In Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Burdett has cast a character like no other in literature. When I rhapsodize about Burdett's Bangkok novels to friends and explain that the protagonist is a Buddhist detective who co-owns a whorehouse in Thailand with his mother...they DO look incredulous! But I was hooked from the first pages of the first book.
"Bangkok Haunts" is rich with all the things I loved about the other novels; descriptions of Thai culture, cuisines, religion, history...traffic...the sex trade...ghosts...foreigners...Burdett makes fascinating the not-so-subtle differences between the "Western" and the "Thai" mind-set. This is the kind of stuff that both entertains and enlightens. I don't often agree with Burdett's/Jitpleecheep's opinions on the efficacy prostitution and corruption, but I am always intrigued, interested and better informed for having thought things through. My only quibble with the plot is the frustrating and incomprehensible relationship between Kimberly (the FBI) and Sonchai's trans-gender partner, Lek. I'll suspend my irritation for now, though; maybe that's the next book!
Another ride through the amazing mind of Detective Jitpleecheep June 28, 2007
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
The third is the best, as John Burdett returns us to Bangkok and inside the mind of Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep in this followup to two previous journeys of the extraordinary kind.
The same circle of characters is here, his mother who runs the prostitute pick-up bar; his boss, Col. Vikorn of the Royal Thai Police, also a part owner of the bar, and his female FBI friend who arrives from the US to help solve the crime. They are merely props this time to the story of Sonchai's love affair with Damrong and her demise. Sonchai's continuing erotic experiences with her spirit after death drives him all over Bangkok and to Cambodia a couple of times in pursuit of the killers.
Burdett weaves another story of incredible breadth and depth, a mystery based on sex, enlightenment, some Buddhist thoughts, and pure shock to the conventional Western mind. It is so alien, most times, to American thought and Judaic-Christian morality, that this becomes a fantasy travelling in an eroticized fun house.
Although this is best of the series, you might enjoy it better after starting at the beginning, as the character development builds in several directions, especially with regards to his former assistant and his new one, a transsexual soon to undergo the knife.
The Western morality tale is fairly conventional, as the good guys win; but the Eastern morality is not so certain, did the good guys really win?
 Not Even Close to Living Up to the Hype December 3, 2007
10 out of 20 found this review helpful
I had read some good reviews of John Burdett's last novel, BANGKOK TATTOO, and was interested in a mystery set in such an exciting setting. I never got around to it, but after several other reviews I read claimed that BANGKOK HAUNTS is even better, my interest had to be satisfied. What a letdown.
Burdett produces a true writing paradox in his placement of the novel in Bangkok. The city and culture pervades the book yet is always superficial. An author could have written the same book set in Los Angeles with surface level, though extensive, tweaking. Compare the feel of Bangkok in this book to the feeling of New York City and its environs in the works of Richard Price or the streets of Paris in the thrillers of Jean-Patrick Manchette. BANGKOK HAUNTS comes up short.
The mystery itself around which the novel revolves turns out to be quite anticlimactic. Even more of a disappointment is the ridiculous mysticism that pervades the book. And I am not talking just superstitious people here. I am talking about spirits walking around the morgue and caught on videotape, soul switching between a living person and a corpse, that kind of thing. If that is your cup of tea, fine by me. But a reader should have a better warning that the supernatural element is so prominent in this novel.
If you do not really understand such supernaturalism, however, it is almost certainly due to the fact that you are a Westerner and just do not get things like southeast Asians do. This patronizing attitude towards Westerners is ubiquitous. And it is NOT simply a matter of someone from one culture just not understanding the customs of another. I would not expect someone off the boat from Thailand to be all that familiar with American culture and customs. Rather, Westerners' lack of understanding goes deeper, to our not understanding the fundamentals of existence because we are just so gosh darn locked in to logical thinking.
Finally, many of the characters that were supposed to be so interesting either were not or, worse, were ridiculous. Yeah, I am sure female FBI agents become enamored of transexual Thai boys all the time. If this is Thailand, my next vacation will be to Istanbul.
"What monsters are we creating?" June 18, 2007
9 out of 21 found this review helpful
Working in Bangkok, devoted Buddhist Royal Thai Police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep believes he has witnessed every depravity known to man; but after viewing a snuff film with a twisted ending, the detective is once more appalled by man's inhumanity to man. In Jitpleecheep's third outing (Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo), Burdett offers an inside view of a different reality, a country driven by enterprise without the banal rationalization of Western mentality. Sonchai views the world at large through a perspective of "functional barbarism": greased by advanced technology, our motives are barbaric, driven entirely by greed. With the aid of FBI Agent Kimberley Jones, currently assigned to uncovering the perpetrators of snuff films, Sonchai admits that the woman brutally murdered in the video is Damrong, his former lover. Currently in a healthier relationship with Chanya, a pregnant ex-prostitute, the detective has never quite recovered from a stormy affair with the murdered woman.
Sharing part ownership in the Old Man's Club with his mother, Sonchai supplements his income with long hours at the bar, an accepted practice for most underpaid police. The bar scene is changing, all-nude dancers replacing the tease of strippers, the city's decadence reaching new lows as exhibited in the video. Even the fate of the disturbing snuff film is at risk; Jitpleecheep personally delivers the disk to Agent Jones for retinal analysis lest someone in the Thai police seize an opportunity to sell it on the internet. Third-world countries are infinitely creative when a few dollars profit means survival: "For the poor, birth is the primary disaster." In this case, Sonchai must avail himself of the resources of Colonel Vikorn, the chief of District 8. The corrupt Colonel has much interest in the increasing decadence of the West and its potential.
As the old makes way for the new in a technologically advanced society, the past remains obdurate. Ancestry has its own demands, as does an ancient belief in the ghost world, the faces of the dead crowding out the living. The forensic pathologist doing the autopsy on Damrong spends her off hours filming the antics of this ghost world, a fact Dr. Supatra and Sonchai hasten to obfuscate before the disbelieving farang eyes of Agent Jones. While Agent Jones faces the angst of unrealized and misplaced passion in the katoey world, accepting finally the alternate universe that she discovers in Thailand, Sonchai makes difficult choices, falling from grace for a time, but resurfacing via his enterprising nature. Meanwhile the once-marginalized porn industry, greedily absorbed by corporations, saturates the internet.
In what is both a chilling mystery and indictment of civilization's continuing exploitation of the disenfranchised, Burdett once again captures the essence of Bangkok, corruption balanced with survival. The relentless wheels of commerce roll on, obliterating those who serve as fodder for profit. The bottom line has no conscience, yet the well-meaning continue to actively inhabit their daily lives, incorruptible men like Jitpleecheep fighting to prevail. In the words of the elusive monk, Gamon: "Love is the foundation of human consciousness...It's our constant betrayal of it that makes us crazy." (Note: Do not miss the shocking Appendix.) Luan Gaines/2007.
Excellent crime fiction August 26, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a revenge tragedy par excellence. I have not read any of the previous novels by Burdett about this Thai detective. I almost did not get beyond the first chapter of this one after I discovered that the crime involved a snuff movie. I do not enjoy anything pornographic or gruesome. But this was not like that at all. In fact, the tactful way the author kept the details of the movie off stage at first kept me reading, and once I was into the plot I was mesmerized. You do finally get most of the details, but he doesn't dwell on them, primarily because the narrator is so appalled by the thing. It is a good strategy. What is so clever here is the way he is able to weave the supernatural into the story and still keep it real and plausible. The final scene where Damrong wreaks her revenge is just breathtaking.
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