The queen of Patpong : a Poke Rafferty thriller

“Hallinan is a wordsmith of the first order, and he puts his great narrative skills into overdrive on this one….You won’t read a better thriller this year!” —John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Treasure Hunt Author Timothy Hallinan returns to Bangkok, Thailand—and plunges his protagonist, travel writer Poke Rafferty, into graver peril than ever before—in The Queen of Patpong, Hallinan’s fourth Rafferty thriller following A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water. Fans of John Burdett, Alexander McCall Smith, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst who love being transported to exotic locales will be riveted when a nightmare figure from the past arrives at Poke Rafferty’s door to bring chaos and danger to the lives of the people he loves.

For American travel writer Poke Rafferty, life finally seems to hold some semblance of stability. He and his longtime love, Rose, have gone through with their much-deferred marriage ceremony, their adopted daughter, Miaow, a former street child, has become a loving—if sometimes difficult—part of the family, and the three of them live in relative comfort thanks to Rose's housekeeping business and Rafferty's writing.

Then a nightmare figure from Rose's time as a Patpong dancer barges into their world, shattering the peace they've worked so hard to obtain. His appearance threatens everything they cherish: their love, their home . . . their very lives. As a foreigner who's seen some of the worst Bangkok has to offer and survived confrontations with Thailand's most powerful and dangerous elements, Rafferty feels equal to most of the challenges Bangkok can throw at him. But now his only hope is to discover the whole truth of Rose's past—a journey down the dark and twisting road that turned a shy, awkward village teenager into the queen of Asia's most lurid red-light street: Patpong Road. And just when Rafferty thought life was looking good, reality comes crashing in as he learns that the secrets from Rose's former life are almost impossible to accept—and even harder to survive.

The Queen of Patpong is a terrifying, heart-breaking, electrifying story of peril, love, and, ultimately, redemption in modern-day Thailand—and the most ambitious, affecting novel yet from thriller master Timothy Hallinan.

Publishers Weekly

Hallinan's compassionate fourth Poke Rafferty thriller (after Breathing Water) finds Poke and his live-in girlfriend, Rose, finally married, but a specter from Rose's past as a dancer on Bangkok's notorious Patpong Road comes back to haunt her. As a naïve country girl named Kwan, Rose fell for the charms of American Howard Horner, never suspecting that Horner's true interest in her involved something far darker than romance. Long thought dead, sly predator Horner is back in Bangkok to stalk Rose and all who are dear to her. Hallinan uses the menace Horner represents to springboard into a sympathetic depiction of Rose's life, revealing without condescension how a simple farm girl decided that the least bad of all the unappealing options open to her was to offer herself to a parade of strangers for money. Rafferty neither idolizes nor demonizes Bangkok's sex workers, instead casting an empathetic but incisive eye on a class of people often reduced to mere caricature. (Sept.)

“Hallinan is a wordsmith of the first order, and he puts his great narrative skills into overdrive on this one ... ou won’t read a better thriller this year!” —John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Treasure Hunt Author Timothy Hallinan returns to Bangkok, Thailand—and plunges his protagonist, travel writer Poke Rafferty, into graver peril than ever before—in The Queen of Patpong, Hallinan’s fourth Rafferty thriller following A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water. Fans of John Burdett, Alexander McCall Smith, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst who love being transported to exotic locales will be riveted when a nightmare figure from the past arrives at Poke Rafferty’s door to bring chaos and danger to the lives of the people he loves Travel writer Poke Rafferty, settling into his life with his wife, Rose, and adopted daughter, is confronted by a man from Rose's past as a Patpong dancer and embarks on a journey to uncover secrets about her former life, which leads him to question if he can accept what he learns The quiet Bangkok family life of American travel-writer Poke Rafferty, wife Rose, and daughter Miaow is threatened when a man from Rose's past forces Poke to uncover the whole truth about his wife's former life in a red-light district