Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is called to investigate a crime scene in Bangkok, which quickly reveals itself to be anything but typical. The victim has been beheaded in a bizarre manner, and a message was left in blood. Then Sonchai is summoned to a river in the middle of the night to observe a spectacle that violates everything he holds dear as a Thai, as a Buddhist, and as a human being. Sonchai’s search for answers takes him deep into the Cambodian jungle, where he faces a conspiracy that may implicate the American CIA and the Chinese military --- and discovers exactly how far a government will go to protect its worst secrets.

Nobody knows Bangkok like Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. But for his newest assignment, everything he knows will be a mere starting point. He’s put in charge of the highest-profile case in Thailand --- an attempt to bring an end to trafficking in human organs. 

John Burdett's famed Royal Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is put to the test both as a Buddhist and as a cop as he confronts the most shocking crime of his career. A rich American film director has been murdered. It is an intriguing case, and solving it could lead to a promotion for Sonchai, but, as always, he is far more concerned with the state of his karma than he is with his status in the earthly realm.

Sonchai has seen virtually everything on his beat in Bangkok's District 8, but nothing like the snuff film he's just been sent anonymously. Furiously fast-paced and laced through with an erotic ghost story that gives a new dark twist to the life of our hero, BANGKOK HAUNTS more than lives up to the smart and darkly funny originality of its predecessors.

A farang --- a foreigner --- has been murdered, his body horribly mutilated, at the Bangkok brothel co-owned by Sonchai’s mother and his boss. The dead man was a CIA agent. To make matters worse, the apparent culprit is sweet-natured Chanya, the brothel’s top earner and a woman whom the devoutly Buddhist sleuth has loved for several lifetimes.

Witnessed by a throng of gaping spectators, a charismatic Marine sergeant is murdered under a Bangkok bridge inside a bolted-shut Mercedes Benz. Among the witnesses are the only two cops in the city not on the take, but within moments one is murdered and his partner, Sonchai Jitpleecheep --- a devout Buddhist and the son of a Thai bar girl and a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. --- is hell-bent on wreaking revenge. On a vigilante mission to capture his partner’s murderer, Sonchai is begrudgingly paired with a beautiful FBI agent named Jones and captures her heart in the process.