Laundry Man (A Jack Shepherd International Thriller) by Jake Needham

Epigraph:  "You're an expatriate.  You've lost touch with the soil.  You get precious.  You drink yourself to death.  You become obsessed by sex.  You spend all your time talking.  You are an expatriate, see?  You hang around cafes."

"It sounds like a swell life, " I said.  "When do I work?"

"You don't work.  One group claims women support you.  Another group claims you're impotent."

(by Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises)

First line in the book:  I've always thought that driving a convertible is an awfully fine way to enjoy the soft-toned stillness of Sunday twilight in Bangkok.

Backcover blurb:  Extortion, corruption, money laundering, and murder.  Just think of it as business as usual.

Once a high-flying international lawyer, a renowned expert on global money laundering, Jack Shepherd has happily swapped the fierce intrigue of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok where now he's just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in an unimportant city.  Or is he?

A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd is a man perpetually tantalized by the moral labyrinth that bedevils all western expatriates in Asia.

An international bank collapses under dubious circumstances; a law partner killed two years ago abruptly reappears; prominent members of the Asian financial community die spectacular deaths; and a twisting trail of deceit and corruption leads Jack Shepherd from Manila to Bangkok to Hong Kong to the fabled island of Phuket, and ultimately all the way back to the life he thought he'd left behind in Washington, perhaps even straight into the White House itself.

About the author:  Jake Needham is the most stylish and atmospheric writer of popular fiction in Asia today.  A lawyer and investment banker in Asia for nearly three decades, he has written numerous screenplays for motion pictures and television and he is the author of four best-selling novels.  Laundry Man is his second novel.  He lives in Bangkok with his wife, a Thai-born concert pianist, and their two sons.

To keep up to date with the author, follow him on Twitter.

A substantially different version of this novel was published in Thailand for limited distribution in Thailand, Myanmar and Indochina, under the title Tea Money.


My thoughts:  I found this book on my Sydney apartment's bookshelf, most probably left there by another tourist-tenant like myself.

Three posts back, I mentioned that I was looking to read a more hard-boiled novel and I have found it.

This is it!

What intrigues me about this book is that it says you can only purchase it in Asia.  Go on to the author's website (click on his name above) to find out why he is not selling it worldwide.  However, when I went on to the Amazon sites both in the USA and the UK, Needham's books showed up in the results and they could be purchased without any problems so I guess that the situation has changed since(?).  Unfortunately, a search in Sydney's bookshops yielded no results.

Being in the Asia region at the moment, I can certainly relate to the culture, ambience, dialogue, colourful and exotic places in the novel.  Still, the most interesting aspect is reading about the experiences and outlook of an expatriate living in a foreign country, fiction or otherwise.

Set at a brisk pace and riveting, I find this modern financial thriller well-written, well-researched and is one of the best books I have read this year.

I highly recommend this novel and the others in the Jack Shepherd series.

You may find this interview conducted in the year 2001 enlightening or watch this video of the author talking about encouraging reading and writing among young people (a writer after my own heart):



Rating:  4/5