Krishna
I don’t know what to make of this book, so let us go straight to the story and I will try to convey the tone and texture of the book in the process. The story is set in Thailand.
When Old Ben hires a hand to dig for well in his backyard, the man hits a metal and when he tries to open it, he falls through into what looks like a room!
Now a crime reporter with a transgender brother (currently female) and another sister comes home to find the home sold by dear mother Muir against the wishes of granddad and they are expected to move deep South, which is dangerous. Her job as a reporter abruptly ends due to the move.
Is it the tongue in cheek reference when you put George W. Bush’s worst quotes at the start of every chapter? (‘I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully” is a sample.)
When the skeletons are discovered, she sees her chance to do crime reporting again.
The story is told with humour too – the part about the skeletons collapsing due to inept police handling and her reaction to it are hilarious. The Major giving her lunch believing her to be from the big city Bangkok; the uncool things she lists about her new home are all funny. Also the story-line dates itself by sentences like “No telephone line so no Internet”.
Jim hears of an abbot being killed in the same city and life becomes interesting. The life in Thailand is cute. (No electronic records before 1992 but old paper records lost due to poor housekeeping – is an example. He must be called Armani because the label on his shirt says so is another.)
The killed abbot is a visiting one from a faraway monastery, it turns out. The current abbot and a nun are in a cloud of suspicion.
Because the author is British, even though Jim is Thai, she thinks and acts like a westerner (Bon Jovi and the like her tastes). Now I know a lot of Thais are into Western music but there are no references to local culture (there are references only to western culture or adopted western culture like Big Brother Thailand) and that is a bit jarring. Just setting the story in Thailand is not enough, if there is absolutely no local colour in the narration.
Get this logic: Internet scams are not real crimes because the companies you fool are net companies and have no ‘real’ brick and mortar presence. So the police should not even bother to look at them. This is at a point where we do not know if the author is even joking, so it comes across as weird.
Not just Jim but everyone behaves like a Westerner. Wild Muir, the mother of Jim Juree may be crazy, but even she would not publish naked picture of herself with her professor everywhere in the college campus. I wish the author could read a local author in translation to see how South Asian minds are supposed to work. This is totally out of character with the locale he is trying to paint.
My God, is the author left wing or what? Every statement drips with social concern and anti corporation. As left wing as, for example, Tom Clancy is right wing.
Her taciturn grandpa Jeh, an ex policeman, gives her valuable hints. Why was the monk wearing a hat? What was “missing” since the bougainvillea plants were uprooted and an empty cigarette lighter was found there? What was “not in the scene”? Based on his hints, a camera is retrieved by Jim.
The title of the book itself comes from a blooper of George W Bush’s statement “People are being killed at the whim of a hat”. Some of the statements quoted by W are so outlandish that you wonder if the author made it up. But apparently not. He gives published newspaper references for each! Try this one for size “I understand small business growth. I was one”. Or “… the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.”
The story meanders a bit. I understand that this is the starting of a whole series of books. The idea is to solve mysteries while treating the story-line as a comedy. It has been done better by so many authors. This one in fact is a lightweight mystery.
The ending has a deux ex machina feel to it – not blatant, but you go ‘what? where was this person all along?’. But the twists on the kidnapping of the politician and the way the real killer is implicated for the disbelieving Bangkok detective bigwigs are interesting.
Then a strange thing happens, the story begins to grow on you and towards the end you really think that this is a much better story than you thought. I love how the two corpses that were found first, starting the whole excitement off and the abbot murder story, which is accidentally found, are explained in relation to each other. Very clever.
Just because the book gets better towards the end, let us say a 5/10
– – Krishna