“Hallinan is a wordsmith of the first order, and he puts his great narrative skills into overdrive on this one….You won’t read a better thriller this year!” —John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Treasure Hunt Author Timothy Hallinan returns to Bangkok, Thailand—and plunges his protagonist, travel writer Poke Rafferty, into graver peril than ever before—in The Queen of Patpong, Hallinan’s fourth Rafferty thriller following A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water. Fans of John Burdett, Alexander McCall Smith, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst who love being transported to exotic locales will be riveted when a nightmare figure from the past arrives at Poke Rafferty’s door to bring chaos and danger to the lives of the people he loves.

Cleo Odzer, a young American anthropologist, spent three years studying Bangkok’s red-light district, Patpong, an area of a few blocks teeming with bars and explicit sex shows. Patpong is now world famous for its available and extremely attractive y

Struggling to rebuild his life after a two-year prison term for unscrupulous choices, former Wall Street hotshot Jason Stafford is tapped by an investment firm to investigate the suspicious death of a junior trader.

Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. That family has weathered extreme challenges—each of its three members carried the scars of a painful and dangerous history—but has stuck together with tenacity and love (and a little help from some friends). Now that family is in jeopardy: the birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces—and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.

An expat detective in Bangkok discovers the dark truths beneath the surface of his chosen home in this “fast, bold, and beautifully written” thriller (T. Jefferson Parker). Travel writer Poke Rafferty was good at looking for trouble—so good that he made a little money writing a few offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored. But that was before Bangkok stole his heart. Now the expat American is happily playing family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and with Miaow, the wary street child he wants to adopt. But settling down won’t be as easy as it seems . . . First, Poke takes in Miaow’s friend, a troubled and terrifying street urchin named Superman. Then he agrees to help an Aussie woman find her missing uncle—and accepts an old woman’s generous payment to find a blackmailing thief. Soon, these three seemingly disparate events begin to overlap, pulling Poke into dark, unfamiliar terrain. Poke soon comes to realize that he’s been gliding across the surface of a culture he really doesn’t understand—and that what he doesn’t know is about to hurt him and everyone he loves.

Fueled by alcohol and legal brilliance, Michael Seeley once oversaw his law firm's most successful litigation. Until it all fell apart. Recklessness and overreach cost him his wife, his job, and likely the life of his last client, a Chinese dissident journalist. Havana Requiem, the latest Seeley novel from the acclaimed author Paul Goldstein, opens after a year's sobriety has earned Seeley back most of what he lost: the partnership in his Manhattan law firm, if not his corner office; the wary respect of most of his partners; the lucrative clients—but not the gin-sharpened passion. Then the renowned Cuban musician Héctor Reynoso enters his office with a simple request: help him and other composers who defined Cuba's musical golden age of the 1940s and '50s—the music that made the Buena Vista Social Club internationally famous—reclaim the copyright to their work. When Reynoso goes missing, Seeley's reluctant promise to help draws him progressively deeper into Havana's violent underbelly and a decades-long conspiracy that runs from the partners in his firm to the U.S. State Department to Cuba's security police, who are willing to do anything to suppress the truth. In the heat of Havana, Seeley will lose himself to his worst and best passions as his pursuit of justice becomes a desperate gambit to save not only his composers but the stunning Amaryll, who is playing her own dangerous game.

A man named Arthur Varney shows up in the Expat Bar on Patpong Road, unquestioningly accepted into its group of aging gents. But he's using them to find Poke Rafferty; Varney wants money Poke doesn't have and a person Poke won't hand over. As his actions threaten both Poke and his best friend, Arthit, the men of the Expat Bar - long sidelined from active life - discover that they may still be a force to reckon with.