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by Christopher R. Cox
A nail-biting debut mystery that plunges readers into the seamy side streets of late-90s Bangkok and across the untamed mountains of the Lao-Vietnam border, hot on the heels of an alluring woman who's officially dead – unless she's masterminded a half-million-dollar life-insurance scam.
An expertly crafted debut, A Good Death introduces Sebastian Damon, a sharp-witted though struggling Boston PI who catches an intriguing case. Linda Watts is a beautiful, talented Southeast Asian refugee with a promising career in finance - or she was, until she turned up dead, the victim of a heroin OD, in a cheap Bangkok guest house. Her death seemed straightforward to the Thai authorities, but her insurance company isn't buying it. They send Sebastian halfway around the world to investigate - where he finds himself confounded and completely out of place chasing faint leads through the broken, bewildering streets of Thailand's teeming capital.
An award-winning journalist with decades of experience traveling in and reporting on Southeast Asia, Christopher R. Cox takes readers on a vibrant journey through a corrupt police bureaucracy, a network of steamy Bangkok nightclubs and grimy hostels to a place where you can you feel the humid air and smell the stir-fried street food. Along the way, Sebastian finds romance as he falls for a captivatingly mysterious woman and camaraderie with his father's wise-cracking old Special Forces wingman - an expat who can navigate Bangkok's chaotic underbelly and the wild mountains of Laos with equal aplomb. For Sebastian, it's the assignment of a lifetime, a chase that will lead him to a long-buried truth at the heart of all the dark lies, a quest that will change him forever in this richly imagined, compelling debut perfect for fans of John Burdett.
"Starred Review. A story that channels Conrad, Kipling, and Francis Ford Coppola… An insightful, transcendent adventure...A Good Death is another example of the only positive to emerge from the Vietnam War - fine writing." – Booklist
"Starred Review. Cox's action-packed debut is perfect for armchair travelers who will be amazed by the author's ability to make gaudy Bangkok and the remote hill country of Laos come alive." –Library Journal
"Intrigue aplenty…A debut thriller whose predominant tone, as its title suggests, is a profound sadness that no death, not even for an insurance company's client, is a good death." - Kirkus
"Vivid descriptive prose helps compensate for the loose plot and sketchy characters." – Publishers Weekly
This information about A Good Death was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
An award-winning journalist, Christopher R. Cox has written on and traveled extensively through Southeast Asia for more than 20 years. His work has appeared in The Boston Herald, Reader's Digest, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Men's Journal and ESPN: The Magazine.
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