I love mysteries almost as much as I love fantasy (fantasy and mystery together is perfect, but not always well done) and I’m willing to take more of a chance on an unknown mystery than an unknown fantasy. (The fact my grandmother loves to read mysteries probably encourages this habit.)

About a year ago I picked up Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. I’ve always been fond of British mysteries, and I’ve branched out to Spanish and Italian mysteries in recent years, so a mystery set in Bangkok (by a Western author) seemed interesting, so I picked it up.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a detective on the Bangkok police force. He’s half Thai, half white, and his mother worked as a prostitute to make sure Sonchai received a good education and future. His boss is corrupt, but pretty much all the police in Bangkok are corrupt, except Sonchai. Not that he wouldn’t be judged as corrupt by Western standards, but by Bangkok standards he’s a clean.

And Bangkok standards are very very different from American standards: prostitutes work openly, drugs of all kinds are common, and corruption is as common as the pollution.

These books are different from my usual reading, first and foremost because of the sex. Prostitution is common and the Thai in Bangkok have very different ideas about sex than Westerners (even if many of the customers are Westerners). But although there is sex, it’s simply part of the landscape: people have sex. That’s life, get on with it. I like that attitude towards sex; it doesn’t bother me the way heaving bosoms tend to annoy me.

And Sonchai himself is fascinating. He’s a bundle of contradictions and foreign to the Western mind. He lives in a corrupt city and accepts that corruption as a way of life, yet lives by his own beliefs.

The other thing that is different about Bangkok is that the Thai are quite open in their belief of spirits. It’s the way things are, and in these books everyone accepts this as fact. In reading some reviews, this apparently bothers some people, this open acceptance of the supernatural. Me? I like it. But then I also love urban and supernatural fantasy, so this should hardly come as a surprise.

If you like mysteries, and enjoy stories set in foreign settings, and aren’t squeaminsh, then you should check out John Burdett’s Bangkok series. It’s complex and fascinating and well worth reading. In theory, you should be able to pick up any book in the series and start there, but although each book is self contained, there is character development in each story, so you may prefer to read the books in order. And as all the books are easily available, it’s probably worth doing so.

Bangkok 8 (2003), Bangkok Tattoo (2005), Bangkok Haunts (2007)