The novel is considerably enhanced by the author’s device of telling it in the second person. Having the tale told directly to the reader is very effective here, particularly because it is made clear that it is being told to a foreigner. This enables Burdett to explain cultural oddities and customs in a natural manner, never seeming didactic. Thus the narrative itself flows smoothly, never seeming forced or crude. And it must be admitted that when the twin mysteries - a murder and a complicated and fraught commercial transaction - are solved, they are done so in a satisfying way well worth the elaborate windup and consequent wait.

Inevitably, there is a lot about drugs in all their aspects in “The Godfather of Kathmandu.” They are central to so much that goes on in its pages. The protagonist narrator, a police officer with a Western father and a Thai mother, straddles many worlds in the balancing act that is his life. And he is keenly aware of this:

“I was sitting at my desk feeling guilty that I was so much richer, all of a sudden, than all the other straight cops; except there weren’t so many of them, so there was no real justification for the guilt, and I was simultaneously wondering if I’d inherited the farang [foreign] disease of self-recrimination from my long-lost GI dad. But I realized I had to do something to earn my dough, even if it was illegal and bad and likely to land me in the drug traffickers’ hell for a couple hundred years. (A Sisyphic adaptation: you are forever pushing your rock up a hill toward the gigantic syringe at the top; just as you are about to grab the smack, your strength gives out and you and the rock are at the bottom of the hill again; and that’s only for small-time dealers - I didn’t dare think what happened to heavy traffickers.)”

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