A Royal Thai Detective Novel (6) - The Bangkok Asset

Unfortunately nowhere near the quality of the first 5 books in this series. Still, excellent description and insight into South-East Asia and great to have so many returning characters. Slightly too farfetched for me.

I enjoyed and highly recommend the first three novels of John Burdette's series. The later novels really push the boundaries of what is credible. I finished the novel for old times sake but found it to be beyond the bounds of credibility.

...this book is no Bangkok 8. While Sonchai is still a great character this story is way too far fetched to be engrossing. Plus, for the most part it leaves out the cultural elements that made B8 and the others so much fun to read. So if you really miss Sonchai as I did and don't care too much that it's a bizarre plot about enhanced humans then read this book. Otherwise skip it.

Not as well written or thought out as his previous novels. He seems too confused to end this particular story. Have really enjoyed all his other books. Maybe he smoked too much cannabis while writing this one.

As one who has been captivated by the mysterious Orient, all I can say is...what an imagination! Mr. Burdett manages to invoke the spirit of the Buddha, lurid steam, fascinating background, and a wonderful story all at once. Have had the pleasure of reading them all and hope for another offering. To be sure, I need to hide this series from my wife, but, I'll bet she would enjoy them too.

the store does not support its original Kindle device so this title is suspended some where -- in the cloud? I would be glad to review it if I could read it on my original Kindle device. I've ordered other titles (even with older publishing dates) and the store will not send to my original Kindle. The author and publisher need to change their agreement with the store so the store will support its original Kindle device. Order with one click and confirmation does not indicate that it can not be loaded on to my original Kindle. I bought a new battery for this model and it is good shape, but now it is obsolete.

Compared with Bangkok 8 and most of his other novels, Mr. Burdett grossly disappointed me in this newest novel . The theme was too unbelievable and didn't give me any additional insights into the Thai character and value system. The writing was on par with his other books but I hope he will continue to expand on the relationship between the main characters who are almost a part of my own life. He has such great talent but this novel simply missed my mind and heart.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the only policeman in Bangkok who isn't on the take, is one of my favorite detectives. Forced to work for the utterly corrupt Colonel Vikorn, he performs the tasks that are assigned to him with long-suffering good humor; and he solves crimes, because he is one of those rare policemen who thinks outside the box.

Unfortunately, THE BANGKOK ASSET takes Jitpleecheep through a plot that is more science fiction than mystery/thriller. Jitpleecheep is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a child whose head was wrenched off by a killer apparently possessed of superhuman strength--perhaps an alien. As it turns out, that is very, very close to the truth. As Jitpleecheep investigates, he quickly finds himself in the middle of high-level political intrigue that involves the auction of an advanced new military weapon--a "transhuman" possessed of such enhanced mental and physical capabilities that the once-merely-human individual relates to ordinary humans in the same way that ordinary humans relate to dumb animals.

THE BANGKOK ASSET is a well-written book that is entertaining to read. Jitpleecheep performs expertly, detects many things, finally learns the identity of his father, and handles himself extremely well (as always). The fictional explanation for the development of the new weapon (the race of transhumans) is fairly plausible and carefully plotted without leaving a lot of loose ends. But at the end, Jitpleecheep is still caught up in the science fiction situation. Apparently the author couldn't think of a way to end the book in a way that would be satisfying to a mystery/thriller fan like myself.

Because the extremely far-fetched plot is complex, full of twists, and entertaining, I rate THE BANGKOK ASSET at 3 stars ("It's okay" on the official the store scale). But instead of looking forward to reading the next book in this series, I'll be headed back to read the older ones that I've missed so far.

If you are unfamiliar with John Burdett’s exotic Royal Thai/Sonchai Jitpleecheep series, you do not necessarily want to start with THE BANGKOK ASSET, the sixth and latest installment. Burdett’s complex plots benefit from gradual initiation --- an initial toe-dipping rather than total immersion, if you will. Thus you would be better served by starting with BANGKOK 8 and working your way forward to this one, which resolves a long-hanging plot line and perhaps introduces another.

To fully grasp that story line, you have to intimately understand Sonchai, a former monk turned Royal Thai Police Force detective who is, we are assured, the only uncorrupted and incorruptible law enforcement official in Bangkok. Sonchai is also a leuk kreung (a half-caste), the result of an assignation between a Thai woman and a United States serviceman during the Vietnam era. Sonchai has been haunted by his father’s identity throughout the series, and the spectre is raised yet again near the beginning of THE BANGKOK ASSET when he is called to the scene of a horrific murder almost across the street from the police station. A young woman has been killed in a manner that seemingly is physically impossible for a human being to have done. However, the main reason Sonchai is called to the location is that a message has been left near the body, addressed specifically to him, that references his father and his identity.

Sonchai has barely recovered from the horror of the murder scene before he is ordered by his corrupt and enigmatic boss, Colonel Vikorn, to another site where, in the midst of a huge storm, he witnesses a strange and violent demonstration of what seems to be superhuman strength by an American who appears to be under the control of a mysterious CIA agent named Hoffman, who has a history in the area that dates back decades. It looks like the CIA has created a physically and psychologically enhanced supersoldier, but that possibility raises further questions: Why is the CIA testing such a creation on Thai soil, and why are the Thai authorities seemingly ignoring it?

Later, an explosion occurs at the home of three elderly Americans (who, interestingly enough, are also naturalized Cambodians) that leaves them seriously injured and uncommunicative. A cell phone apparently belonging to one of them contains almost a hundred photos of Sonchai. When another phone turns up with more images of him, he is pulled further into the investigation of the explosion as well. It quickly becomes all too clear that Sonchai is the focal point of the three cases.

Then things get really strange. Sonchai is taken on a bizarre odyssey to Cambodia; there, he visits a mysterious site, hidden for decades, where a mind-boggling experiment took place and is making its way back into the world. Everything is changing, right under the noses of the population. No one --- not even Sonchai --- can do anything about it, and he has a connection that he never could have imagined.

My feelings about THE BANGKOK ASSET waxed and waned throughout the first third of the book. However, at about the halfway point, the curtain gets yanked back a bit and one is shown what is really going on. Still, there is a lot of chatter throughout the book, with some of it arguably unnecessary and some that reads as if it was influenced by exposure to a Mae Brussell radio broadcast at an impressionable age. Nevertheless, the balance of the novel is chilling and prophetic. Given the time lag that occurs between the creation of a book and bringing it to market, Burdett obviously wrote this one some months before current events in the public eye occurred, a coincidence (if you believe in such) that makes THE BANGKOK ASSET all the more of an eye-opener.

It’s not just the plot that’s worth staying for. Burdett’s descriptions of the ins and outs of Bangkok, geographically and culturally, and the cast of exotic characters are just as riveting as the story in which they are featured. This is true of no one more than Sonchai, who seems buffeted throughout the book by forces beyond his control yet is strongly anchored by his own sense of right and somehow finds his way out of an impossible dilemma, at least temporarily.

All things considered, THE BANGKOK ASSET is worth your time, but please note that this is not your daddy’s --- or even your older sibling’s --- police procedural.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

John Burdett writes professional, witty, thought-provoking, thrillers -- whopping-good detective stories in which Thailand jumps out as a character in its own right. And it’s not the Thailand of happy smiles and quaint customs, of smiling food vendors and sandy beaches, it’s a Thailand of spirits, vice, racism, corruption, thuggery, entitlement, opportunism, semi-feudalism, caste-like attitudes, superstition, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Just read between the lines of the Bangkok Post newspaper for a while and you’ll begin to get a sense of what I mean.

In this sense John is in good company with two other Thailand-based foreign writers -- Christopher G. Moore and Colin Cotterill -- who are also superb story tellers and who give the reader an important sense of place.

John Burdett’s loyal readers might take issue with Bangkok Asset. In his previous books he’s toyed with plots involving spirits (real and perceived) and, as the Scots might suggest, “events beyond our ken.” But he always kept such themes in check; the spirits knew their place in the narrative. But I have a feeling that while writing Bangkok Asset he said “the hell with it, let’s push the envelope,” and went off-piste with a story that puts his half-Thai, half-Caucasian detective hero Sonchai Jitpleecheep into a new territory, a situation involving his life quest, and human manipulations that question the meaning and evolution of religion, humanity, military power, ethics, social control, and geopolitics. Perhaps I’ve already given away too much. For me the book works, and while reading it I was torn between wanting to read it slowly, to savor the plot and big ideas, and reading it quickly because I was so anxious to see what happened.

Absolutely awful book. Read it on the recommendation of Christopher G. Moore, a favorite author and creator of the Vincent Calvino series which I think are very good reads. This book is nothing more then an anti American screed with a plot and characters that are totally unbelievable, more like poorly written science fiction. Though the U.S. did some very bad things in SE Asia this book is just absurd in its accusations. As a Brit he might do better to write about the British supporting the Empire by getting Chinese hooked on opium and then fighting for the right to keep doing so. This is my first experience with John Burdett as an author and will be the last despite some good reviews about the main character Sonchai. Could not finish the book it was so bad.

Certainly not the usual Burdett/Sonchai tale - as our hero get lead well away from the Soi Cowboy bars and the simple folk/lifestyle of 'Ban Nok' or outback Issan. Sonchai it seems has a halfbrother who is amongst an elite new group of 'Trans-humans' - the latest thing in enforcement that the that the super powers are racing one and other to develop. Having spent years there myself, I like tales based in and around the Kingdom, however my least favoured genre is probably science fiction. In this tale, Sonchai departs the 'Dr Siri' like world of Colin Cotterils great stories, to something closer to Bacigalupi's acclaimed 'The wind-up girl'. Much like that novel, there is some sense or possibility in what is envisaged for our future, but I just don't know if the confirmed Buddhist Detective Jitpleecheep was an ideal target to express those views. Nonetheless the usual well written and crafted Burdett tale.

Everything Burdett writes is well written. He is a master at developing a sense of place and mood. That said, The Bangkok Asset was a big disappointment. Burdett has shifted from dark mystery to science fiction. I love science fiction, but I read this (all of the Bangkok series) because of the setting, characters, and constantly evolving Buddhism that weaves through all the books. This has the same characters and setting, and Sonchai is still a devout Buddhist, but the story is off the track with "super heroes" (trans humans) who R quickly learns are "super villians". I went back and read parts of the much earlier Bangkok Tattoo which only emphasized the differences that left me so disappointed. The ending offers no hope. No conclusions. Just the opportunity for a sequel or two. If they are in the same vein, I won't buy...even though I love John Burdett's series.

\Where should one start in describing this firecracker thriller? It’s a detective story with a Thai detective, Sonjai Jitpleecheep, who may be the one incorruptible on the whole police force. But the detection doesn’t lead to a resolution that is at all positive or tidy and eventually no one has to pay for the murders narrated here except for one rogue and decidedly over the hill CIA agent. It’s –almost-- sci fi, with a gimmick that, alas, could conceivably happen, and that is horrific in its implications for poor us. It’s dystopic, depicting a future that will be infinitely worse than our present, but comic too, almost manic in pace. And lastly, it’s a novel filled with color, about a place we have heard and read about but most of us don’t know –an exotic Otherland. Whatever it is, it’s a darned good read. The action rockets along non-stop, puzzles galore lie about begging to be solved, engaging characters populate the pages of this hybrid creation, a detective-science fiction-dystopian novel. To use two of my favorite words to describe novels I like: it‘s fun and it’s interesting. There’s never a dull moment in it.

Sonjai’s at the heart of it. Called to investigate a brutal killing --the killer ripped the victim’s head off in one clean snap—he finds a message addressed to him (by name, no less) written neatly in blood across the top of a mirror. He is sent to investigate a bombing in one of the multitudinous slums of Bangkok and there is a new cell phone with one hundred photographs of him on it and a single number on the phone registry for him to call. More puzzles follow, some involving Inspector Krom, Sonjai’s new associate on the police force: she’s stronger physically and quicker mentally than the people around her, and she exerts a strange fascination which is part sexual and part not over Sonjai’s almost-wife Chanya. Sonjai’s personal life –his hunt for a never known American father- and his professional life intertwine: Sonjai learns more about his heritage than perhaps he had hoped to learn.

Last year just about this time, I read Ian Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, strategies. Bostrom speculated: how would we respond, and could we effectively, if an advanced intelligence came along that had its own values and motivators? Suppose it didn’t care what happened to us any more? Burdett’s book addresses some of the same issues but from a very different, much more oblique point of attack, but it’s equally disturbing.
Chanya comes back from a night with Krom and tells Sonjai: "Something’s been going on, maybe for decades, behind the backs of ordinary people. While we’ve been amusing ourselves with our little human issues that have to do with love, sex, and freedom, and the quality of life and democracy and pollution and stewardship of the earth—little minor things like that, which will turn out to be mere distractions—something else has been happening. Something that is about to change everything suddenly and forever . . .It all really is going to be over, all of it."

And again a few pages later: "The hidden purpose of modernism is to offer a cop-out that turns us into manipulable dolls. No one grows up anymore. Everyone is immortal. When the entire species is stuck at the mental age of thirteen and a half with heads full of noise and football, that’s when they take over. Not long to go. Pretty much there already...."

That’s what this novel is about: who ‘they’ are, what’s happening now, and can we do anything about it. At one point in the novel, one of the characters says to Sonjai: “You’re like a man who went fishing for trout and caught a whale.” You better believe it! This book’s a sizzler.

This is a wildly imaginative novel, a murder mystery that wanders off into the realm of science fiction. In a way I found it the most intriguing of John Burnett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels.

Detective Sonchai of the Royal Thai Police Force witnesses a murder that seems to have been orchestrated by a handsome white guy of superhuman strength. Sonchai is also in the middle of investigating another crime, a hands-on murder that could only have been committed by some sort of maniacal superman.

To deal with these perplexing cases, Sonchai is teamed up with Inspector Krom, an intimidating tattooed lesbian with a genius for computer technology. She’s attracted to his wife.

As an added complication, this investigation, so unique in his experience, takes Sonchai forward in his obsessive search for his white GI father.

The main villain of the piece a charming psycho whose every utterance is seductive and amusing. A secondary villain is a mad, drug-addicted British shrink with a certain urbane appeal. This novel is suffused with dark humor delivered with a light touch. The grim philosophical musings on human nature and the future of humanity are more entertaining than depressing, thanks to Burdock's witty style.

This book could be seen as a satire on the arms race, consumerism, nationalism, modern angst, corporate greed, genocide, and just about everything else. Fortunately at the heart of all this is a totally engaging story.

I can't imagine where Burnett will go from here. Meanwhile, this is a book fans of the series won't want to miss. The plot is so bizarre that I think The Bangkok Asset would also be fun for a reader new to the series.

Burdett has a fine writing style and a great character...and he wastes it on the most ridiculous plot. I'm ok with some of the journeys into the spiritual and supernatural, but this book is just a mess. If I cared, I could point out several contradictory plot points, but I just couldn't care. I could live with the repetitious (overlong) dialogue if it didn't read like Glenn Beck talking about the "Trilateral Commission". Apparently, "it is a mathematical certainty that the Dollar will soon collapse", and it gets worse from there.

5 or 6 books into the series, Burdett continues to delight, astonish, and horrify. Like most detective fiction, the central character, yes, is a compelling person, but the milieu in which he operates is the real star of the show. This remains, of course, plot-driven and character-driven prose...by no means is Burdett some sort of stylist who luxuriates in description...but Thailand/Southeast Asia and the ways of behavior are what most interest him. And me. As can be expected, this is hard-boiled detective stuff with a bit of mystery and mysticism tearing through it. Rationalists will be left in the dust.

To really get behind & through this cutting-edge novel the reader must remember that Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a Buddhist at his core, his soul.
The setting is now; however, one must remember William Gibson's Burning Chrome/The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed. From my perspective there are two parallel story lines: one set in a transhumanist plot; the other using transhumanism as a metaphor for today's ruling elite.
A little background that is not in the story line/About 1966 Shakey became the first electronic person. The science developed into two communities. One of these communities has relentlessly pursued the automation of the human experience. The other, pursued intelligence augmentation with machine symbiosis. AI [artificial Intelligence] and IA [intelligence augmentation]. The Bangkok Asset brings the reader up-to-date in the merging of the two into transhumanism/the theory that the human race can evolve beyond it's current physical & mental limitations. Interestingly a quote that's been used is to describe this is/If we're lucky, they'll keep us as pets.
The novel starts as Sonchai, Buddhist detective of the Royal Thai Police Force, is called to investigate a murder that, for all appearances, looks to be targeted for him to specifically investigate. And so begins a razor-edged & mysterious investigation that leads the reader through, and into a near future - that is currently ongoing and surrounds us all.
Get ready to have you socks knocked-off; ready or not.

I truly enjoy this series of novels about Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. This latest novel is somewhat different, but still extremely enjoyable. I am not going to recount the plot, as others will do so and I don't like to give anything away. Storywise it veers from the expected police investigation into a cyber mystery and occasionally into a near science fiction scenario. Through it all Sonchai tries as usual to maintain his sense of justice, and Buddhist morality. His humanity, and humanity in general are very much at stake in this novel. The pace is at times slow and then disorienting, I think to reflect Sonchai's state of mind. The last third of the book goes lightning quick, but the ending is like hitting a brick wall - it's almost a cliffhanger. You are left with a lot to think about, and wondering what happens in the scene after the final one. Possibly the next book will continue the storyline? All in all, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read.