Bangkok is one of the great cities in the world, but unlike other great metropolises it has no noir tales to its name. Bangkok Noir puts that to right. In this first ever noir anthology of Bangkok, twelve seasoned and internationally known — Thai and Western — writers have come together to make a powerful collection of crime fiction short stories that portray the dark side of this Asian metropolis where the lives of most citizens seem as far away from heaven as its Thai name Krungthep is distant from its meaning — City of Angels. In Bangkok Noir, the twelve short stories of various shades of black involve gangsters and hitmen, love and betrayal, the supernatural, the possessed and the...

Simeon Grist knows the City of Angels inside and out--the sex for sale, the chic seductions, the clientele of every bar from downtown L.A. to Venice. So when he's hired by a Hollywood recording company to shadow one Sally Oldfield, suspected of embezzlement, Grist discovers she's heavily invested in something far more lucrative than CDs--namely the Church of the Eternal Moment--a million-dollar religious scam built around a 12-year-old channeler and the voice of a man who has been dead for a millennium. Though he tails Sally all the way to a seedy motel and a date with a murderer, he's too late to save her. And now he knows snooping has gotten him in way too deep, for he's become the next...

Behind every great fortune is a great crime… For American ex-pat writer Poke Rafferty, a late-night poker game delivers an unexpected prize: an "opportunity" to write the biography of Khun Pan, a flamboyant, vulgar, self-made billionaire with a criminal past and far-reaching political ambitions. The win seems like a stroke of luck, but as with so many things in vibrant, seductive, contradictory Bangkok – a city of innocence and evil, power and poverty – the allure of appearances masks something much darker. Within a few hours of folding his cards, Rafferty, his wife, Rose, beloved adopted daughter, Miaow, and best friend, Arthit, an honest Bangkok cop, have become pawns in a political...