Among critics Mr. Burdett has both ardent fans and equally ardent skeptics. Laura Miller of Salon.com described “Bangkok 8” as a “deliciously fresh breath of air in the often musty halls of detective fiction.” Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, bridled at the book’s “grotesque, voyeuristic scenes” and found the female characters not “remotely credible.”

Mr. 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, Mr. 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 his writing is also keenly anthropological. He explains the improbable presence of Buddhist shrines 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 Mr. 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.”

Mr. Burdett is neither judgmental about prostitution nor particularly probing about its sociological impact. His personal view is that there is nothing to justify.

“Prostitution is the oldest profession that we know of, and it isn’t going to go away,” he said reflexively. “The only time it’s ever gone away is in police states, and even then the police state had to be at its most hysterical.”

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