Christopher R. Cox

My spouse handed this one to me. Another dead-tree book. It was fairly interesting, albeit a bit on the grisly side. So, we have a private detective, Sebastian Damon, who is hired by an insurance agency to investigate the seeming death of a young Thai woman, Linda Watts. Watts had been a banker in Boston. On a visit to Thailand, she suddenly appears to have been murdered. At least someone was murdered who fit Watts' description adequately, and who had Watts' passport in her possession. The insurance company was suspicious and sent Damon to Thailand to investigate.

For a while Damon runs into lots of dead ends. Then, one day, he actually spies Watts singing in one of Thailand's many (it seems) seamy watering holes. He tracks her down. She admits that her death was "faked" (i.e. not a "good death") so that she could get insurance money to aid her in finding her father. He is alleged to still be living in a mountain village in the remote areas where Thiland, Laos, and Cambodia meet. She had long believed her father to have died. He'd been one of the MIAs from the Viet Nam war and had made a life for himself with one of the hill tribes. Something like that.

So, with the help of Sam Honeyman, an old army buddy of Sebastian's father, who had stayed behind to help hunt for MIAs, and had never left South East Asia, Sebastian and Linda headed off to the village of her birth. Along the way, they have to evade police and ???

It's a pretty interesting book, in part because it describes a part of the world about which we know so little, but a part which had been, and still is, badly damaged by our necessary-only-to-the-war-contractors-and-the-Congress-critters-who-luxuriate-in-their-money military "adventures" in the area back in the 1960s and 1970s. In some ways, pretty grisly.
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