If you are unfamiliar with John Burdett’s exotic Royal Thai/Sonchai Jitpleecheep series, you do not necessarily want to start with THE BANGKOK ASSET, the sixth and latest installment. Burdett’s complex plots benefit from gradual initiation --- an initial toe-dipping rather than total immersion, if you will. Thus you would be better served by starting with BANGKOK 8 and working your way forward to this one, which resolves a long-hanging plot line and perhaps introduces another.

To fully grasp that story line, you have to intimately understand Sonchai, a former monk turned Royal Thai Police Force detective who is, we are assured, the only uncorrupted and incorruptible law enforcement official in Bangkok. Sonchai is also a leuk kreung (a half-caste), the result of an assignation between a Thai woman and a United States serviceman during the Vietnam era. Sonchai has been haunted by his father’s identity throughout the series, and the spectre is raised yet again near the beginning of THE BANGKOK ASSET when he is called to the scene of a horrific murder almost across the street from the police station. A young woman has been killed in a manner that seemingly is physically impossible for a human being to have done. However, the main reason Sonchai is called to the location is that a message has been left near the body, addressed specifically to him, that references his father and his identity. 

"[T]he balance of the novel is chilling and prophetic.... THE BANGKOK ASSET is worth your time, but please note that this is not your daddy’s --- or even your older sibling’s --- police procedural."

Sonchai has barely recovered from the horror of the murder scene before he is ordered by his corrupt and enigmatic boss, Colonel Vikorn, to another site where, in the midst of a huge storm, he witnesses a strange and violent demonstration of what seems to be superhuman strength by an American who appears to be under the control of a mysterious CIA agent named Hoffman, who has a history in the area that dates back decades. It looks like the CIA has created a physically and psychologically enhanced supersoldier, but that possibility raises further questions: Why is the CIA testing such a creation on Thai soil, and why are the Thai authorities seemingly ignoring it?

Later, an explosion occurs at the home of three elderly Americans (who, interestingly enough, are also naturalized Cambodians) that leaves them seriously injured and uncommunicative. A cell phone apparently belonging to one of them contains almost a hundred photos of Sonchai. When another phone turns up with more images of him, he is pulled further into the investigation of the explosion as well. It quickly becomes all too clear that Sonchai is the focal point of the three cases.

Then things get really strange. Sonchai is taken on a bizarre odyssey to Cambodia; there, he visits a mysterious site, hidden for decades, where a mind-boggling experiment took place and is making its way back into the world. Everything is changing, right under the noses of the population. No one --- not even Sonchai --- can do anything about it, and he has a connection that he never could have imagined.

My feelings about THE BANGKOK ASSET waxed and waned throughout the first third of the book. However, at about the halfway point, the curtain gets yanked back a bit and one is shown what is really going on. Still, there is a lot of chatter throughout the book, with some of it arguably unnecessary and some that reads as if it was influenced by exposure to a Mae Brussell radio broadcast at an impressionable age. Nevertheless, the balance of the novel is chilling and prophetic. Given the time lag that occurs between the creation of a book and bringing it to market, Burdett obviously wrote this one some months before current events in the public eye occurred, a coincidence (if you believe in such) that makes THE BANGKOK ASSET all the more of an eye-opener.

It’s not just the plot that’s worth staying for. Burdett’s descriptions of the ins and outs of Bangkok, geographically and culturally, and the cast of exotic characters are just as riveting as the story in which they are featured. This is true of no one more than Sonchai, who seems buffeted throughout the book by forces beyond his control yet is strongly anchored by his own sense of right and somehow finds his way out of an impossible dilemma, at least temporarily.

All things considered, THE BANGKOK ASSET is worth your time, but please note that this is not your daddy’s --- or even your older sibling’s --- police procedural.