Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
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 […]
Continue ReadingFrom 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 […]
Continue ReadingSitting 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 […]
Continue ReadingGreat 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 […]
Continue ReadingVIENTIANE — 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 […]
Continue ReadingSet 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 […]
Continue ReadingThe 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 […]
Continue Reading“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 […]
Continue Reading“Quintessentially this exhilarating read incorporates everything from lies and deception through to sex, betrayal and death, offering the reader an exercise in edge of your seat action combined with strong storytelling and believable characterisation.” The Man with the Golden Mind, the second […]
Continue ReadingCrime writer Paul Brazill interviews me about my current crime fiction projects including the republication of my 1960s CIA thriller The Man with the Golden Mind, featuring former war correspondent turned Detective Maier. The second Maier mystery is currently published by Crime Wave Press in ebook format. Julia Rendel asks Maier to investigate the twenty-five […]
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