The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallinan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Poke Rafferty is a half Filipino, half Anglo American living in Bangkok. He is a writer, author of a series of travel books with the title Looking for Trouble in... wherever. This is the second book in Timothy Hallinan's series featuring this character.
Poke has put together a family of himself, his fiancee Rose, who is a former go-go dancer, and his newly adopted daughter Miaow, a former street kid. They live together in his apartment and he is looking forward to marrying Rose and living happily ever after.
His idyllic life in interrupted when the cleaning service co-owned by Rose and another woman becomes involved, through no fault of their own, in a counterfeit money scheme. The women find themselves under investigation by local police and a Secret Service Agent who is there because some of the counterfeit money is American. Poke, of course, jumps in to try to help them and gets on the wrong side of the Secret Service Agent.
So far, the plot seemed pretty straightforward, but then it took a radical twist when the long-estranged father whom he thought was dead turns up and contacts Rafferty. Poke has good reason to hate his father and tries to avoid becoming involved with him. But he is kidnapped and brought to meet the man and finds that involvement is impossible to avoid.
The father, Frank Rafferty, has a box full of rubies and fraudulent identity papers, which it turns out that he stole from one of the most dangerous criminals in China. He also has a daughter Ming-Li, Poke's half sister whom he didn't know he had. Soon we learn that that dangerous criminal is hot on Frank's trail. When a man who was a former C.I.A. asset and an acquaintance of Poke's turns up dead, having been gruesomely murdered, it is clear that the gangster will spare no effort to find and recover the items stolen from him and if that means a few more people have to die along the way, he's okay with that.
The plot gets more and more complicated as we learn that the counterfeit money is coming from an operation in North Korea. The repressive regime that runs that country like a Soprano's family business is utterly ruthless in pushing its main export of counterfeit bills.
The Chinese gangster, meanwhile, is determined to get Frank Rafferty and, in pursuit of that aim, he kidnaps Rose, Miaow, and Poke's friend Arthit's wife, Noi. In order to try to recover them, Poke and Arthit, a Bangkok policeman, must use every skill and every asset available to them.
Everything gets very complicated at this point - a little too complicated, actually. Hallinan seems to be straining a bit to keep all of these balls in the air. Perhaps if he could have brought himself to pare down some of the elements, he would have had a better-structured, cleaner story.
Still, Hallinan is very good at creating an atmosphere and he brings to life the streets of Bangkok in a very believable way. I've never been there, unfortunately, but he gives us a real feel for the city and its people and especially its climate of frequent rain and hot and humid weather. One can almost feel the rain running down one's back.
View all my reviews
A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Phillip "Poke" Rafferty is a half Irish, half Filipino American ex-pat travel writer living in Bangkok. He has a series of travel books called Looking for Trouble in..., as in Looking for Trouble in Shanghai or Looking for Trouble in the Philippines. When he came to look for trouble in Bangkok, he lost his heart and he stayed.
He fell in love with Bangkok, but he also fell in love with Rose, an ex go-go dancer/prostitute, now turned entrepreneur who is trying to set up a cleaning business. But he really lost his heart to Miaow, an eight-year-old homeless girl, a wary and damaged street child whom he has taken into his life and whom he wants to adopt. He is trying to establish this blended family of himself, Rose, and Miaow.
Poke makes a little money with his travel books and articles but not enough to make the adoption of Miaow possible. He needs money to grease the wheels of Thai bureaucracy.
His policeman friend, Arthit, offers him a lifeline when he recommends him to an Australian woman who is looking for her uncle who has disappeared in Bangkok. He tells the woman that Poke might be able to find her uncle. She's willing to pay good money for his services. So begins Poke's career as a detective.
His investigation into the life of the beloved uncle leads him to some truly horrifying discoveries.The sex trade, especially the use of children in that trade, is a well-known feature of life in Bangkok, but it is impossible to imagine - and I don't want to imagine - the depths of depravity that are reached by the practitioners and customers of this trade. (In fact, my eyes just glided right over some of the passages describing that "business.") And Poke finds that the kindly old uncle is up to his testicles in it.
A few weeks before he disappeared, the uncle had hired a new maid, the inscrutably named Doughnut, who has also disappeared. Poke believes the maid is the key to the conundrum and he begins following her trail.
He finds the agency that sent Doughnut to the uncle and discovers that before working for him, she had worked for a very rich and reclusive woman. When he visits her, he sees a cruel and terrifying old woman, Madame Wing, who claims to have had something stolen from her for which the thief is now trying to extort money. She wants to hire Poke to find the lost merchandise and return it. She is willing to pay him handsomely.
Meanwhile, his life at home has become a bit more complicated with the arrival of a friend of Miaow's, a troubled and filthy street urchin called Superman. At Miaow's urging, he reluctantly agrees to take the child into his home - temporarily.
Gradually, these seemingly disparate situations and events begin to converge and Poke begins to understand something essential about Thai culture and about Buddhism: All things are connected.
I found reading this book a bit of a slog at first, but then something clicked and I began to get into it - to empathize with Poke and his somewhat stumbling attempts to understand the culture around him and especially to empathize with the children who are the victims of man's ultimate inhumanity and yet who are tough survivors and full of possibilities. I especially found the character of Rose and the philosophy that has sustained her to be intriguing. She is someone that I like very much.
In fact, all of the main characters here are appealing. Timothy Hallinan has done a good job of revealing them to us, I think. They are people with whom I wouldn't mind spending more time.
View all my reviews