Cheryl R. (Spuddie) -
#1 Poke Rafferty mystery set in Bangkok, Thailand. Poke is a travel writer living in Bangkok with Miaow, a young urchin he rescued from the streets and (sometimes) Rose, his girlfriend--a former bar girl who is now trying to set up her own cleaning business. Poke hopes to adopt Miaow, which costs a lot of money, so he takes up some detective work on the side hoping to generate some cash.
Miaow has brought home a stray of her own, a boy a couple of years older than herself who is known on the streets as Superman--a troubled youth that Miaow insists must stay with them. Poke looks into the disappearance of an Australian man for his niece who has traveled to Bangkok to track him down after not hearing from him for several months. One of the leads he follows in that case leads him to the home of Madame Wing, a reclusive, very rich woman who then hires him to locate the man who robbed a safe of some sensitive, personal documents that could destroy her.
He doesn't like Madame Wing, and as he begins to discover more about the particularly cruel and gruesome tastes of Uncle Claus Ulrich, he almost hopes he doesn't find him, either. And someone definitely doesn't like him nosing around--is it a couple of crooked cops, some of Madame Wing's entourage or someone else? Poke knows he and his cobbled-together family won't be safe until he sees both cases through to some sort of resolution.
Hard to say much more without giving away too much. But just....wow. Excellent first entry in series, rich in cultural detail, an easy-reading style that made it hard to put down, and yet captured in this fast-paced thriller were some very poignant moments that quickly endeared you to Poke and his friends and family. It's a hard book to read sometimes, with the horrors it exposes, but an excellent book all the same. Not for the faint of heart--graphic violence and abuse are depicted, but in my opinion, they are definitely not 'gratuitous' but essential to the plot and the story.
Miaow has brought home a stray of her own, a boy a couple of years older than herself who is known on the streets as Superman--a troubled youth that Miaow insists must stay with them. Poke looks into the disappearance of an Australian man for his niece who has traveled to Bangkok to track him down after not hearing from him for several months. One of the leads he follows in that case leads him to the home of Madame Wing, a reclusive, very rich woman who then hires him to locate the man who robbed a safe of some sensitive, personal documents that could destroy her.
He doesn't like Madame Wing, and as he begins to discover more about the particularly cruel and gruesome tastes of Uncle Claus Ulrich, he almost hopes he doesn't find him, either. And someone definitely doesn't like him nosing around--is it a couple of crooked cops, some of Madame Wing's entourage or someone else? Poke knows he and his cobbled-together family won't be safe until he sees both cases through to some sort of resolution.
Hard to say much more without giving away too much. But just....wow. Excellent first entry in series, rich in cultural detail, an easy-reading style that made it hard to put down, and yet captured in this fast-paced thriller were some very poignant moments that quickly endeared you to Poke and his friends and family. It's a hard book to read sometimes, with the horrors it exposes, but an excellent book all the same. Not for the faint of heart--graphic violence and abuse are depicted, but in my opinion, they are definitely not 'gratuitous' but essential to the plot and the story.
Mary D. (readstoclem) reviewed A Nail Through the Heart (Poke Rafferty, Bk 1) on + 118 more book reviews
This is the first book in the Poke Rafferty series about an American travel writer living in Bangkok (as does the author). He deals with street children, inlcluding child pornography and torture, and another case takes him back to the wars of Southeast Asia and military torture. This is an excellent book, extremely well-written, but not for everyone. I had no trouble jumping over any paragraphs I did not want to read, and the principle of a good man coming to grips with reality carried the story exceptionally well with many light and warm interactions in a vibrant culture.
