All of Tom Vater’s fiction is out with Next Chapter Publishing & the print editions are gorgeous.

Afghanistan Algeria Books Burma Cambodia India Laos Mali Pakistan Russia Thailand UK USA

Here are the book links to all my titles.

Thanks to all my readers for many years of support… these stories have been more than 20 years in the making.

Keep reading books!

The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu

In 1976, four friends – Dan, Fred, Tim and Thierry – are on a bus along the hippie trail from London to Kathmandu. But everything is not going according to plan. After a drug deal goes wrong, the boys barely escape with their lives. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs and a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, and Fred disappears with the drug money. A quarter-century later, mysterious emails invite the other three to pick up their share of the money, and they decide to reunite in Kathmandu. Soon, a trail of kidnapping and murder leads them 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 takes them amongst Himalayan peaks, and towards the inevitable showdown with their past.

Kolkata Noir

Becker is a British traveler in trouble. Madhurima is a rising star police officer. In these three explosive tales, the two join forces to investigate the city’s crooked high society. On the way, they take on deluded would-be messiahs in search of Mother Teresa’s stolen millions, encounter fanatics, circus freaks and cannibals, fall in and out of love and pay homage to one of the world’s most beautiful and toughest cities. Amidst passion, murder and mayhem, is there room for two lovers driven by justice and compassion? Tom Vater’s ‘Kolkata Noir’ is a riveting crime fiction cycle of three novellas set in the past, the present and the future.

The Green Panthers

Meet Clara Green, Emerald, Chartreuse, Olive, Hunter, Juniper and Forest. They are The Green Panthers: a privately sponsored, multi-national underground army, on a mission to hold corporate polluters to account. During the attempted rescue of a snow leopard hunted by British tycoons in Siberia, the Green Panthers stumble onto Project SILEO, a millionaires’ plot to abandon an overpopulated, dying planet battered by climate change and pollution. But SILEO is a lot more than it seems and the Panthers soon learn of an even greater threat to humanity. From Britain to Thailand and the privately-owned space station Stella Blue, the Panthers race against time to save the human race from a man known only as the Slow King. As riots and unrest take hold all over the world, can they stop the Slow King’s apocalyptic ambitions? An action-packed dystopian thriller, The Green Panthers explores systemic corruption, capitalism, space exploration and climate change, as well as the nature of friendship and courage in a future world where everything is for sale.

The Detective Maier Mystery Collection:

The Cambodian Book of the Dead

Cambodia, 2001 – a country re-emerging 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. A beautiful, scarred woman with a mythical and frightening past, a Khmer Rouge general, an expat gangster, an old flame, a man-eating shark and a gang of teenage girl assassins lead the detective back in time, through the communist revolution and 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. Captured and imprisoned, Maier 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 Man with the Golden Mind

Detective Maier has a new case. This time it is a cold case: investigating the death of Julia Rendel’s father, an East German culture 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. The real prize, however, is the file’s author: someone codenamed Weltmeister, a former US and Vietnamese spy and assassin no one has seen for a quarter century. Racing against time, Maier needs to dig deep into the past – including his own – in order to make sense of the present. The second book in Tom Vater’s Detective Maier Mysteries series, The Man With The Golden Mind is an action-packed thriller with plenty of sex, drugs, assassinations and double-crosses.

The Monsoon Ghost Image

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. 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. Traveling to Thailand, all Maier finds is trouble and a photograph. But as soon as Maier puts his hands on the Monsoon Ghost Image, the detective turns from hunter to hunted. The CIA, a doctor with a penchant for violence and a mysterious woman known as the Wicked Witch Of The East all want to get their fingers on Ritter’s most important piece of work. 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 the darkest truths of our time – and save their lives.

The Complete Detective Maier Mystery Collection – All three titles in one volume

New Non Fiction:

Sharkman

In 1992, mechanic Peter Hauser and two friends bought three old cars and set off from southern Germany to cross the Sahara and drive to Togo, where they planned to sell their vehicles. They never reached their destination. The young, free-wheeling adventurers were ambushed by Tuareg bandits on the Algeria-Mali border, kidnapped and disappeared into the vast nothingness of the desert. Thirty years later, Peter Hauser lives in a tent between jungle and ocean on a remote archipelago in Southern Thailand. Every day, Peter heads out into the deep blue to swim with tiger sharks, apex predators and masters over life and death, to find out what fear means to all of us.