Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
Originally published by Exhibit A, my second Detective Maier novel, The Man with the Golden Mind, is now available again via Crime Wave Press. Julia Rendel asks 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 […]
Continue ReadingI somehow missed the recent passing of Vint Lawrence, CIA handler of notorious Hmong General Vang Pao in Long Cheng, Laos, in the early 60s, who threw his secret agent career away to become a political cartoonist in Washington. Read an obituary and summary of Vint’s remarkable life here. Vint Lawrence is interviewed in the […]
Continue Reading“The Plain of Jars, what it’s a symbol of, is how those people on the vague frontiers, those people in the Third World, those people we never see, we never know about, we never hear, can be vaporised, wiped off the face of the earth without people back here even knowing about it.” My obituary […]
Continue ReadingThe Man with the Golden Mind, the second Detective Maier Mystery, published by Exhibit A Books, gets reviewed by Kevin Cummings in The Chiang Mai City News. Vater has fine-tuned his craft. The writing is tighter than The Cambodian Book of the Dead (Exhibit A 2013) although still on the darker and more violent side of crime […]
Continue ReadingThe Podcast I did back in June on my new novel The Man with the Golden Mind, the second Detective Maier Mystery has had more than 17.000 listens. Thanks very much to Stuart Beaton at The Small Picture Podcasts for the great interview. Listen to the full podcast here.
Continue Reading…there is little relief from a barrage of very dark deeds and sudden grisly deaths. To mine any humour from this book you will need a very black view of the world. Chris Roberts reviews The Man with the Golden Mind at Crime Review UK. As previously mentioned, my publisher Exhibit A decided to call […]
Continue ReadingThe Man with the Golden Mind. Photographed by Manis On Fire.
Continue Reading…plenty of sex, drugs, assassinations, executions, kidnapping, double-crosses and other darkness-tinged exotica along the way. How I came up with The Man with the Golden Mind, over at Exhibit A.
Continue ReadingRead the opening chapter of The Man with the Golden Mind, out today with Exhibit A Books in the US and UK. Julia Rendel asks 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 […]
Continue ReadingThe second Maier Mystery, The Man with the Golden Mind, is out today. The novel is set in Laos and based on the CIA’s largest covert operation to date. Read an excellent and generous review by Terry Irving. The book is a quest for truth, a search for a father and family, and a journey […]
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