A Steamy Taste of Crime—Thai Style

Before the penetrating heat and liquid atmosphere of a Nashville summer fades into memory, there's still time to stretch out on the porch with a thriller set in a city where summer never ends: Bangkok. Timothy Hallinan knows the city well and continues to share its dirty secrets in his second Poke Rafferty novel, The Fourth Watcher (William Morrow, 320 pp., $24.95). The action he conjures is as hot as Bangkok's climate.

Hallinan, a veteran writer with an L.A.-based series already under his belt, maintains residences in both the U.S. and Southeast Asia. His first Bangkok book, A Nail Through the Heart, introduced Rafferty, a genial, wise-cracking expatriate travel writer who can't seem to shake trouble. The Fourth Watcher begins with Rafferty researching a new book and trying to establish a somewhat unconventional family in the teeming streets of a city best known in the West as a destination for sex tours. Before he can dry off from the latest cloudburst, he finds himself contending with international counterfeiters and his long-lost father, a man whom Rafferty would prefer to remain lost. Soon the needs of both his families, the chosen and the imposed, put Rafferty's world on the edge of an Asian abyss.

In an author's note, Hallinan writes, "If any government in the world today needs overthrowing, it's North Korea's." But the menace in The Fourth Watcher comes from more than just Kim Jong Il's perverted regime. It is present in the ubiquitous sex trade, where women and children are commodities rather than people. It is manifested in the greed and violence of the Chinese triads. It comes from the sky in the form of low-riding clouds that drench Bangkok in monsoon rain, hiding crimes behind curtains of water. And always there is the heat, affecting every aspect of life, even the way people walk: "It shortens the stride and makes it pointless to waste energy lifting the feet higher than absolutely necessary; all the effort goes into moving forward."

However, there is no shuffle in the pace of The Fourth Watcher. The action is fast and captures the mood of a city living in the center of both social and climatological storms. It is a fitting setting for a well-told tale of family, politics and murder.

Timothy Hallinan presents a writing workshop at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 10.