Laos – Page 2 – Tom Vater

The Man with the Golden Mind selected as a Must Read for 2019 by CQI Magazine

October 10, 2018October 10, 2018tomLeave a Comment

The Man with the Golden Mind, the second Detective Maier Mystery, has been selected as a Must Read title for 2019 by CQI Magazine (pages 44-45). Julia Rendel asks Detective Maier to investigate the twenty-five year old murder of her father, an East German cultural attaché who was killed near a fabled CIA airbase in […]

Some of my best recent stories in the Nikkei Asian Review

June 23, 2018June 23, 2018tomLeave a Comment

From a punk rock collective in Borneo to European proto-colonies and ethnic minorities in India, rock stars and a circus from Cambodia, the scourge of development in Laos, female motorcycle taxi drivers in Thailand, Japanese entrepreneurs in France and my eye witness reports of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Asian Nikkei Review has published some […]

Vang Vieng, Laos: From party capital to eco-adventure paradise on CNN Travel

May 22, 2018May 22, 2018tomLeave a Comment

Sitting on the banks of the Song River, the rural town might seem serene now. But Vang Vieng has seen a tumultuous 15 years, evolving from an agricultural community to a hedonistic party capital when it was “discovered” by Western shoestring travelers in the late 1990s. Excessive drinking, drugs, trash, concrete construction and fatal accidents […]

The Tom Vater Collection at the British Library to be digitally preserved

May 14, 2018May 15, 2018tomLeave a Comment

This recording is part of the Tom Vater Collection (C799) at the British Library. A longer extract has been published on The Moken: sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea (Topic Records TSCD919, 2001). The full collection also includes recordings from India, Laos and Cambodia. It will be digitally preserved as part of the Unlocking our […]

Literary Flits reviews The Man with the Golden Mind

April 25, 2018April 25, 2018tomLeave a Comment

Great review at Literary Flits of my second Detective Maier thriller, The Man with the Golden Mind, from a while back. Somehow this one escaped me altogether. I am again impressed with a Crime Wave Press offering, this one being a Cold War aftermath spy thriller set in a country about which I knew very […]

Tourism woes in Laos in The Nikkei Asian Review

February 19, 2018March 2, 2019tomLeave a Comment

VIENTIANE — It is Saturday afternoon in tourist high season, and Vientiane is very quiet. Most shops are closed for the weekend. A couple of Asian tour groups ascend the Patuxai, the Laotian capital’s answer to the Arc de Triomphe. On every floor, stalls are packed with five-year-old photocopies of the Lonely Planet guide to […]

Vang Vieng Boutique Riverside in The Daily Telegraph

February 19, 2018February 19, 2018tomLeave a Comment

Set on the banks of the Song River and facing spectacular limestone mountain ridges, Vang Vieng’s swankiest hotel resort offers a winning combination of Laotian culture and French colonial era ambience, with fantastic service, excellent facilities, great tours and a good restaurant… I am just back from Laos, where I was researching articles for the […]

Interview by Sonia Kilvington

May 25, 2017July 11, 2017tomLeave a Comment

I am interviewed this week by crime writer Sonia Kilvington on all things Crime Wave Press and my two Detective Maier mysteries, The Cambodian Book of the Dead and The Man with the Golden Mind. I first came to Cambodia in 1995, illegally on a speed boat from Trat to Koh Kong. Someone wrote that […]

The Man With The Golden Mind reviewed at Literary Fits

January 31, 2017tomLeave a Comment

The Man with the Golden Mind gets a great review at Literary Fits. “I am again impressed with a Crime Wave Press offering, this one being a Cold War aftermath spy thriller set in a country about which I knew very little: Laos. Tom Vater sets up an intricate and complicated plot which I found […]

The Man with the Golden Mind reviewed at Creative Writer’s Boost

November 20, 2016November 20, 2016tomLeave a Comment

“The Man with the Golden Mind brings postwar Viet Nam back on the grid. As you walk along with Cultural Attache Rendel and his mysterious spy cohort, code named Weldmeister, you can almost smell the damp smell from the muddy river.” The […]