Jack Needham's Laundry Man is a thriller/mystery set in Bangkok, and it is a well-paced, action-packed adventure from page 1 to the end. And I won't be telling you about the end.
There are a number of Western-authored adventure novels based in Thailand, but Laundry Many differs in many ways from others I have read. The hero--Jack Shepherd--is an expatriate, as are the chief figures of Chris Moore and John Burdett, but he seems more connected to Western life than do the protagonists of those other writers.
Shepherd, like his author, is a former lawyer who works now at other things. As we meet him, he has taken a position as a professor of international law and commerce in a Thai university. This, he gives as his reason for moving from the US to Thailand. He maintains connections and experience with the working world, both by taking occasional law tasks and also by serving on boards of internationsl companies. Based upon this novel, we can assume that Needham has experience in the machinations of international finance.
Shepherd lives with an artist, and has what one might call the eternal conflict between his individual interests and those deemed "communal" by his female companion. In other words, she often doesn't approve of what he gets himself involved with. If she only knew!
Shepherd has various relationships with positions of authority in his Bangkok world. He has a good relationship with a Thai police officer, although we'll see in the next novel how it survived this one! And he has relationships with various other expatriate figures in Thailand. This seems quite natural, as his value to Thai society is as a representative of the world outside Thailand.
The story involves Shepherd in a whole series of events in which he is largely clueless as to his role and how he got involved. In that sense, Shepherd is like many heros of Alfred Hitchkock films--the innocent who gets thrown into situations way, way over his head. It is his thinking about what is going on that gives us most of our clues. We see no more of any situation than does Shepherd, so we depend upon his thinking to make us conscious of what we need to know.
There are many observations of Thai life and, especially, the lives of expatriates within Thailand (and surrounding countries). The existence of tourists is noted but not explored. Nor do we see much of the life of ordinary Thai citizens. The story must stay focussed on what is happening to Shepherd, because it is a complex story, and we need Shepherd's observations to understand necessary aspects of international finance, for example.
This is not a police procedural, nor is it a detective story in the strict sense. Shepherd certainly gets into a detective situation, but it is through his own curiousity and not as work for a client.
My own experience in Thailand has been so limited that it remains an unknown area for me, but I was able to follow along when Shepherd goes to Hong Kong for a meeting (and some unscheduled adventure). Surely, an attraction of such exotic thrillers as this novel of Needham is when the reader can say "I know where that is!" and reinforce his or her own experience.
I hope for the reader's sake that he has no experience with the world of international high finance, as we see that it can be very, very dangerous indeed. We'll leave the danger to Jack Shepherd, who gets into enough trouble for us to appreciate that he's there, taking it on the shins, while we're comfortably enthralled in this tale of modern adventure.
A great start to what we hope are the many adventures of Jack Shepherd in his adopted country of Thailand.