Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A travel writer named Poke Rafferty moonlights as a detective.
A Nail Through the Heart
What you need to know before your trail
Poke Rafferty, an American expat, was writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored when Bangkok stole his heart.
Now he’s making a new family with Rose,a former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and Miaow, the tiny, streetwise urchin he wants to adopt.
But trouble in the guise of good intentions comes calling just when everything is beginning to work out. Poke agrees to take in Superman, Miaow’s troubled and terrifying friend from the gutter. Then he agrees to help locate a distraught Aussie woman’s missing uncle and accepts a generous payment to find a blackmailing thief. No longer gliding carelessly across the surface of a culture he doesn’t really understand, suddenly Poke is plodding through dark and unfamiliar terrain—and everything and everyone he loves is in terrible danger.
Locations
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Bangkok
Bangkok is a river town, built around a network of canals radiating off the Chao Praya, the silt – saturated River of Kings. The city’s office towers, roads and palaces float queasily on a tropical floodplain. Even in the dry season, the water is always there, pooled just beneath the dirt, just beneath the pavement,. Waiting for some fool with a shovel
The author says that Tuol Sleng still stands in Phnom Penh as a monument to the thousands who spent their last day in torment there.
The economics of Patpong and Nana Plaza persuade most of the women to remain in the bars. Hundreds even thousands of girls come down each year from the impoverished northeast to take their place
Cambodia
Tuol Sleng still stands in Phnom Penh as a monument to the thousands who spent their last day in torment there.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: A Nail Through the Heart
Author/Guide: Timothy Hallinan Destination: Bangkok, Phnom Penh Departure Time: 2000s
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