Book Previews

Inside into Thai Living, Cops & Robbers, Relaxing Thai Ways, Tsunami, and much more...

The day with her has been serene and uneventful. But earlier, after making love, he noticed her scar from a cesarean section and asked her about it. That’s when she started telling him about the recent events of her life, and was soon in tears, her chest tight with an urgent need to talk. She obviously trusted him deeply, telling her life story as if he could help in some way.

Set before a backdrop in Southeast Asia, the story unfolds with the adventure of an international courier. His first courier duties send him to the exotic land of Siam. In the "Land of Smiles", Mike becomes romantically involved with not one, but two beautiful Thai women.

Tippawan Bongkot is a young Thai woman on the run. Life as she knew it, ended the night she caught her fiance with his lover. Her world collapsed the day she lost her job. Desperate to find work, Tippawan escapes to the resort city of Pattaya hoping that things will change and her bad luck will end. When she meets the farang, a foreigner named Mike, her world does change, but in ways she could have never imagined. Her search for happiness is a haunting adventure not easily forgotten.

Hello from the Cape! How are you doing these days, my friend? I'm basically sitting on my old man's ass enjoying the life I can now have because of what happened to us last month in Laos. Even as I sit here scribbling this postcard off to you, I can't believe what we did and got away with doing over there.

Toy’s mother didn’t tell her until the day after her 17th birthday. It came as a rude shock as she had always thought her mother loved her too much to send her away from the village.

The first drops of rain begin a sharp staccato on the tin roof of the bungalow. Gusts whip through the palm trees, bending dried fronds to the will of the monsoonal wind. Harsh, imperfect gongs ring out into the night as coconuts plummet earthward, their freefall abruptly interrupted by metal. And yet the waif sleeps.

I rarely sleep very well at night. At night sleep is difficult as the night is nosier than the day. In the early hours scrawny stray soi dogs fight over scraps of restaurant slops left out on the street outside my window. The dogs fight over scraps, angry howls and snarls piercing through the night leaving one with no doubt why the stalls on the main street sell various designs of pellet guns, some with night sight scopes.

A strange and savage saunter through the Thai and Cambodian badlands...

An excerpt from George Lee's book... an oversized, slightly retarded giant and his pensioner mentor do Thailand for the first time

His first week on the frontline saw him interrupt a couple of hormonally charged adolescents exchanging bodily fluids under some seating in the gymnasium. They’d hidden themselves quite well, but the girl’s shriek of pain and scathing rebuke that used the words ‘wrong’ and ‘hole’ in the same sentence gave them away.

Sex and violence in Phnom Penh. Sharky’s, Phnom Penh, is as civilized as the bar scene gets in Cambodia. Found a bit of the central bar to lean against, fend off a few of the more unsavoury women, one so far gone she took no notice of my polite refusal to exist on the same planet. She eventually moves away a few yards, settles down to staring daggers for the rest of my time in the bar. Water off a duck’s back.

Chapter one excerpt: First Morning in the Temple

It is 1980, and the security of the American Embassy in Bangkok is under threat - from one of its own… Diplomat Axel Trink's career is tainted with wrongdoings and an obsession with gaining revenge on his boss, Josephine Bateman, who years earlier took advantage of him to jump-start her own Foreign Service career. This obsession takes a deadly turn when Trink gets involved with local terrorists and gangsters.

Chapter from Bangkok Express.