Written with incredible pace and verve, BANGKOK COWBOY combines a very good plot with a couple of great central characters. Army veteran and PI Mason is in Thailand, disappearing after a bad war experience and an imploded marriage. In a series of elegantly incorporated thought bubbles, Mason's backstory is filled in well, including how he came to be in a business partnership and close friendship with Dixie. A Thai ladyboy, Dixie is a strong, brave, and gorgeous character, working with Mason and as a highly sought after personal escort. An unlikely friendship maybe, but well done, with a real sense of affection and concern for each other. They work as a pairing, as unlikely as it might seem.

The plot of the novel centres around the disappearance of a friend of Mason's - Nat West has been working as an accountant for a notorious gangster nightclub owner. She's gone missing along with a hard drive full of information that Raymond Long is very keen to get back. As are his mob bosses, right back to his Canadian roots.

There's quite a bit more to BANGKOK COWBOY than your standard thriller, mostly based on the lifestyle of Mason and his friends, and Dixie's contacts. Their connections and respect for each other adds a different dimension to the novel, although not at the expense of everything you'd normally expect. There's action aplenty, and some cunning outwitting of the bad guys by both Dixie and Mason. Perhaps less convincing is a bit of voluntary jeopardy at points where some resolutions were required - all of which were just a bit too daft on the part of the characters to be totally believable, although the action built into them does make it all a lot more palatable.

Minor quibbles apart, there was a lot to like about BANGKOK COWBOY, and a lot to look forward to in the next Mason and Dixie outing. Hopefully soon.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-bangkok-cowboy-ron-mcmillan ( )

Bangkok Cowboy, by Ron McMillan, is an excellent thriller, set in a far-away and exotic locale, peopled by strong characters, and sizzling with tension punctuated by lightening flashes of violence.

The stalwart protagonists of Bangkok Cowboy are named Mason and Dixie. [C'mon, you've got to love it!] After serving with the British forces in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, Mason is now an expat private investigator living in Bangkok, Thailand. The story opens as he witnesses the murder of a drunken tourist but decides not to get involved, a glimpse at rampant amorality in the story. Shortly thereafter he is visited by Raymond Long and Tony Cowboy, two Thai mobsters. It was Long's sex club bouncers who had kicked the tourist to death a couple of nights before. Long wants to hire Mason to find his missing accountant, a woman named Nat West, and retrieve a missing computer hard drive that contains "sensitive business information." Mason takes the case, even though he knows that he is being hired by a mobster, a "controller of whores by the hundred, and casual overseer of the disposal of a drunken tourist's corpse" [Kindle location 205]. You see, Nathalie West is Mason's ex-girlfriend/lover and he knows that if Long and his goons find Nathalie first, she will suffer a slow and tortured death. Mason phones his transgendered investigative partner, Dixie, thought by Mason to be "one of the most beautiful women he had ever known" [loc. 248], and tells her that they have a case.

The action of the novel takes place in the scorching heat and sleaze of Bangkok's sex and beer hubs, the fetid odor of the klongs (canals) that meander through the city, the back alley noodle vendors and the five star hotels. The atmosphere depicted in the novel is twisted and rank and brutal. Interestingly, the U.S. News and World Report ran an article on their website, usnews.com, on June 20, 2014, the day this review was begun, headlined: "Junta seeks to clean up Thailand's image as haven for crime, vice and corruption." The article goes on to focus on the junta's efforts against airport taxi mafias, ladyboy gangs, bad monks, weapons possession and drug-dealing inmates. It would seem that the amorality, sleaze and violence depicted in Bangkok Cowboy has a grounding in reality.

Long not only runs many of the sex clubs in Bangkok, but he and his cohort, Tony Cowboy, "trade under-aged kids to fellow kiddie rapists" [loc. 691] , have criminal records in Canada and are associated with mob outfits in Vancouver. In short, the group of antagonists and their psychopathic associates are nasty and evil to the bone and are quite powerful and capable adversaries to the small company of Mason and Dixie Investigations.

As setbacks and red herrings impede the investigators, violent clashes reinforce the tension. Bangkok Cowboy has all of the essential characteristics of a good thriller - sustained tension, mortal danger, a corrupt and amoral setting, sudden violence, evil antagonists, and flawed but likable protagonists whose success at staying alive and solving their case is anything but assured. Recommended.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )