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Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. That family has weathered extreme challenges—each of its three members carried the scars of a painful and dangerous history—but has stuck together with tenacity and love (and a little help from some friends). Now that family is in jeopardy: the birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces—and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.
Quick-talking burglar Junior Bender gets blackmailed into starting a new career as a private investigator for crooks in this hilarious Hollywood mystery Junior Bender, a burglar with a magic touch, is being blackmailed into taking on a new freelance job. One of LA’s biggest crime bosses is producing a porn movie that someone keeps sabotaging; Junior’s job is to figure out who’s responsible and keep the movie on track. The trouble is, he’s not sure he can go through with the job, blackmail or no blackmail. The actress lined up to star in the film, Thistle Downing, is an ex-child star who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. This movie would be scandalous fodder for tabloids around the country. Junior knows what he should do—get Thistle out and find her some help—but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of some scary people.
“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.
"Exceedingly funny . . . this one's good for what ails you."—The New York Times Reluctant P.I. to the perfidious, Junior Bender, may be L.A.’s smoothest operator but when he breaks one of the cardinal rules of burglary (don’t take scores that you’re being paid way too much for) he finds himself once again on the wrong side of, well, the wrong side. Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well: in the criminal underworld, if you’re offered more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he’s bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snat...
An expat detective in Bangkok discovers the dark truths beneath the surface of his chosen home in this “fast, bold, and beautifully written” thriller (T. Jefferson Parker). Travel writer Poke Rafferty was good at looking for trouble—so good that he made a little money writing a few offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored. But that was before Bangkok stole his heart. Now the expat American is happily playing family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and with Miaow, the wary street child he wants to adopt. But settling down won’t be as easy as it seems . . . First, Poke takes in Miaow’s friend, a troubled and terrifying street urchin named Superman. Then he agrees to help an Aussie woman find her missing uncle—and accepts an old woman’s generous payment to find a blackmailing thief. Soon, these three seemingly disparate events begin to overlap, pulling Poke into dark, unfamiliar terrain. Poke soon comes to realize that he’s been gliding across the surface of a culture he really doesn’t understand—and that what he doesn’t know is about to hurt him and everyone he loves.
"Burglar Junior Bender may just be our favorite literary P.I."—Entertainment Weekly It’s three days until Christmas and Junior Bender, Hollywood’s fasttalking fixer for the felonious, is up to his ears in shopping mall Santas, Russian mobsters, desperate holiday shoppers, and (’tis the season) murder. The halls are decked, the deck is stacked, and here comes that jolly old elf. Junior Bender, divorced father of one and burglar extraordinaire, finds himself stuck inside the Edgerton Mall, and not just as a last-minute shopper (though he is that too). Edgerton isn’t exactly the epicenter of holiday cheer, despite its two Santas, canned Christmas music, chintzy bows, and festive light...
Junior Bender, Los Angeles burglar and off-the-books detective to the felonious, is reminded that rock and roll will never die (no matter how fervently he wishes some of it would) when Hollywood's most dangerous geriatric mobster, Irwin Dressler, retains Junior's investigative services to solve a rather unharmonious problem. Four of Dressler's old gangster colleagues have put together a national tour of once-popular rock bands they own a piece of: three nights of concerts by guys (and a few gals) who were big shots back in the 1960s and 1970s, and who are now hoping for one more gasp of glory with this nostalgia exhibition. The Rock of Ages tour has proved itself to be anything but a love fe...
L.A. private eye Simeon Grist is led to The Church of the Eternal Moment when the woman he is paid to follow dies, and he uncovers channeling, televangelism, blackmail, and murder, and finds himself in mortal danger
After seven years in Bangkok, American travel writer Poke Rafferty finally feels settled: his family is about to grow larger, and his adopted Thai daughter, Miaow, seems to have settled in at junior high school. All that is endangered when Miaow helps her boyfriend buy a stolen iPhone that contains photographs of two disgraced police officers, both of whom have been murdered. As Miaow's carefully constructed personal life falls apart, Rafferty discovers that the murders are part of a conspiracy that reaches the top rungs of Bangkok law enforcement, and beyond. Miaow's discovery threatens the entire family—and if that's not enough, in order to survive, they may ultimately have to depend on someone who has already betrayed them.
JUNIOR BENDER UNTANGLES ONE OF THE WEIRDEST MYSTERIES IN TINSELTOWN LA burglar Junior Bender has (unfortunately) developed a reputation as a competent private investigator for crooks. The unfortunate part about this is that regardless of whether he solves the crime or not, someone dangerous is going to be unhappy with him, either his suspect or his employer. Now Junior is being bullied into proving aging music industry mogul Vinnie DiGaudio is innocent of the murder of a nasty tabloid journalist he'd threatened to kill a couple times. It doesn’t help that the dead journalist’s widow is one pretty lady, and she’s trying to get Junior to mix pleasure with business. Just as the investigation is spiraling out of control, Junior's hard-drinking landlady begs him to solve the disappearance of her daughter, who got involved with a very questionable character. And, worst news of all, both Junior's ex-wife and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Rina, seem to have new boyfriends. What a mess.