Fiction

Books

The Detective Maier Trilogy

“The narrative is fast-paced and the frequent action scenes are convincingly written. The smells and sounds of Cambodia are vividly brought to life, and aficionados of this kind of writing will love the book. “

— Crime Fiction Lover

The Monsoon Ghost Image (2018)

DIRTY PICTURES, SECRET WARS AND HUMAN BEASTS – DETECTIVE MAIER IS BACK TO INVESTIGATE THE POLITICS OF MURDER

When award-winning German conflict photographer Martin Ritter disappears in a boating accident in Thailand, the nation mourns the loss of a cultural icon. But a few weeks later, Detective Maier’s agency in Hamburg gets a call from Ritter’s wife. Her husband has been seen alive on the streets of Bangkok. Maier decides to travel to Thailand to find Ritter. But all he finds is trouble and a photograph.

As soon as Maier puts his hands on the Monsoon Ghost Image, the detective turns from hunter to hunted – the CIA, international business interests, a doctor with a penchant for mutilation and a woman who calls herself the Wicked Witch of the East all want to get their fingers on Martin Ritter’s most important piece of work – visual proof of a post 9/11 CIA rendition and the torture of a suspected Muslim terrorist on Thai soil. From the concrete canyons of the Thai capital to the savage jungles and hedonist party islands of southern Thailand, Maier and his sidekick Mikhail race against formidable foes to discover some of our darkest truths and to save their lives into the bargain.

This time, under the sure hands of Tom Vater, the dark side of Thailand springs to life in vivid detail. The readers get a birds’ eye view of it all—from the back streets of Bangkok, Thai torture chambers, hedonistic party islands, sea gypsies and a millionaire’s island retreat that masquerades as a modern day Jurassic Park where men with too much money and time on their hands hunt humans instead of dinosaurs as sport.”
-Categorically Well Read

Buy The Monsoon Ghost Image here.

Buy the entire Detective Maier Trilogy here.

The Man With The Golden Mind (2014)

A GRIPPING THRILLER BASED ON A TRUE STORY, THE CIA’S LARGEST OPERATION IN HISTORY, THE AGENCY’S COVERT WAR IN LAOS IN THE 1960s.

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 central Laos in 1976.
But before the detective can set off, his client is kidnapped right out of his arms.
Maier follows Julia’s trail to the Laotian capital Vientiane, where he learns different parties, including his missing client are searching for a legendary CIA file crammed with Cold War secrets.
But the real prize is the file’s author, a man codenamed Weltmeister, a former US and Vietnamese spy and assassin no one has seen for a quarter century.

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 it a joy to get lost in and also introduces interesting and believable characters, both male and female. The women in this novel aren’t just eye candy!
— Literary Flits

Buy The Man with The Golden Mind here.

Buy the entire Detective Maier Trilogy here.

The Cambodian Book of the Dead (2013)

APOCALYPSE NOW MEETS THE BEACH IN THIS DARK, EXPLOSIVE THRILLER!

Cambodia 2001 – a country re-emerges from a half century of war, genocide, famine and cultural collapse.
German Detective Maier travels to Phnom Penh, the Asian kingdom’s ramshackle capital to find the heir to a Hamburg coffee empire.
As soon as the private eye and former war reporter arrives in Cambodia, his search for the young coffee magnate leads into the darkest corners of the country’s history and back in time, through the communist revolution to the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal who hides amongst the detritus of another nation’s collapse and reigns over an ancient Khmer temple deep in the jungles of Cambodia.
Maier, captured and imprisoned, is forced into the worst job of his life – he is to write the biography of the White Spider, a tale of mass murder that reaches from the Cambodian Killing Fields back to Europe’s concentration camps – or die.

“The Cambodian Book of the Dead is a hard boiled crime story wrapped in a surreal meditation on genocide, globalisation and the expatriate condition, by a writer who has acute observations to make on all three subjects.”
— Pulp Curry

Buy The Cambodian Book of the Dead here.

Buy the audio book The Cambodian Book of the Dead here.

Buy the entire Detective Maier Trilogy here.

The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu (2006)

The Devil’s Road To Kathmandu is a tense, fast paced and kaleidoscopic pulp thriller, following the lives of two generations of drifters who become embroiled in a saga of sex, drugs and murder on the road between London and the Indian subcontinent. In 1976, four friends, Dan, Fred, Tim and Thierry, drive a bus along the hippy trail from London to Kathmandu. En Route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong, yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs and even a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, Fred disappears with the drug money. A quarter century later, after receiving mysterious emails inviting them to pick up their share of the money, Dan, Tim and Thierry are back in Kathmandu. The Nepalese capital is not the blissful mountain backwater they remember. Soon a trail of kidnapping and murder leads across the Roof of the World. With the help of Dan’s backpacking son, a tattooed lady and a Buddhist angel, the ageing hippies try to solve a 25-year old mystery that leads them amongst Himalayan peaks for a dramatic showdown with their past.

“A better backpacker novel than The Beach.”— Bangkok Post

Multiple narratives and parallel plots give this book breadth and depth – quite a mind trip, actually, and a rather addictive read.” – Lifestyle + Travel

“A gripping and clever tale of sex, crime, love, narcotics and greed, though not necessarily in that order.”— Untamed Travel

Buy The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu here.

Kathmandu, Camino al Infierno (2013)

Kathmandu, camino al infierno’ es una historia frenética y desgarradora repleta de humor negro. Un intenso relato que entremezcla de forma brillante la vida de dos generaciones de viajeros con la mítica ruta hippie como telón de fondo.

Es 1976 y tres amigos, emprenden un alocado viaje en un desvencijado autobús desde Europa hasta Nepal a través del Irán previo a la revolución, la Pakistán feudal y la sorprendente India. Pero pronto todo se tuerce y se verán envueltos en un enredo de sexo, drogas y muerte en la carretera que une Londres con Katmandú. Un cuarto de siglo después regresarán a la capital de Nepal en busca de todo aquello que dejaron atrás, pero ni la ciudad, ni ellos mismos son lo que eran.

Watch the Trailer for the Spanish edition of The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu here.

Buy Kathmandu, Camino al Infierno here.

Check out more great crime fiction at Crime Wave Press, Asia’s independent English language crime fiction imprint.

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