Until it isn’t. One john lead to another, the sex got heavier and kinkier, and dear Damrong got snuffed, up close and on camera. This being Bangkok, however, death was just the start of another whole new life.

Which is probably why Burdett chose to begin his book in such a murderous manner. Not only intimately attuned to Thai culture and cuisine, he’s acutely aware of Theravada Buddhist beliefs, especially vipassana, the Elders’ Way of seeing things as they really are — and can be.

In other words, Burdett gets it, and he gets it good. He got it first in Bangkok 8 with its “indigenous ghouls,” and he got it again in Bangkok Tattoo, where skin trade took on a whole new tact. That the cat chooses to go the back alley route only makes the getting that much more profound.

In sum, Burdett parts “a magic-ravaged land,” where hungry ghosts and past lives and amulets and offerings all come into play, and too a world where the farang (Western foreigners) are feebly ferocious; katoeys (transsexuals) are shrewd — and marketable; and colonels come corrupt as a matter of course. We’re talkin’ ’bout the intersection of high and low, the crossroads where crime collides with enlightenment, a place dirty and dangerous and dark enough to reveal the deepest inner light.

Dig it.

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