Material Witness website

This is the first of John Burdett’s novels I have read, and to be honest it made me wonder what the hell I’ve been doing with my life. It is electric, dazzling, sensational – the literary equivalent of mind-altering pharmaceuticals, the trade of which, incidentally, are at the heart of a bewilderingly thrilling plot. Continue Reading…

Liffeyside website

An American film producer on vacation in Thailand is found dead in a seedy hotel in Bangkok. Detectives Sukum and Sonchai Jitpleecheep, affable hero of the novel, of the Royal Thai police force are sent to investigate. From glancing around the room Sonchai is able to correctly deduce the manner in which the American was murdered. Sukum is awed by Sonji’s powers. Continue Reading…

The Godfather of Kathmandu is a Tibetan Buddhist teaching for our time. Burdett’s grasp of karma (so often simplified in Western interpretations) cuts to the bone. Continue Reading…

Many trace the modern crime thriller back to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A still more venerable ancestor would be Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In both cases literary giants used acts of aggravated homicide to illustrate the most agonising dilemmas of their day. Continue Reading…

Thai detective serves up street-level riffs on contemporary Asia.

John Burdett is writing the most exciting set of crime novels in the world. The four books featuring Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep demonstrate the enormous elasticity of the genre and how a talented writer can use it to discourse on just about anything. Continue Reading…