Modern Bangkok is many things to many people. Tourists these days are likely to come for the shopping, the fabulous restaurants, the $5 foot massages and the nearby golf courses and beaches.

But Burdett keeps a tight focus on Bangkok as sin city, a “lusty, clawing” metropolis of exotic bar girls, shady jade dealers, Viagra-popping Western johns and corrupt cops.

Burdett explores a side of Thai society that has long fascinated Westerners: the apparent willingness of large numbers of women here to sell their bodies without obvious shame - and in a country where brothels are illegal, the willingness of the police, the government and the society as a whole to look the other way.

Make no mistake, Burdett’s books are fantasy: a murder victim in “Bangkok 8″ is killed by snakes that snap out of hibernation when the amphetamine-laced ice in which they are packed melts.

Yet Burdett’s writing is also keenly anthropological, decorated with wry observations that carry a ring of truth to those who live in Thailand.

He explains the improbable presence of a Buddhist shrine at the entrance to many sex bars. He takes us inside brothels, behind the bar, upstairs into the private rooms and downstairs into the members-only sections of Bangkok’s “saunas.”

When Burdett takes the reader to a red-light district during daylight hours, we trust that a bar might really smell like “pine-cleaning fluid blended with stale beer, cigarettes and cheap perfume,” as he wrote in “Bangkok 8.”

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