Great line from A Nail in the Heart

So, I've been reading this mystery by an American PR exec about Thailand, A Nail in the Heart based on a recommendation from Fantastic Fiction. I've been a little obssessed about Thailand since Bangkok 8. Alas, maybe I'd like this book better if I hadn't read Burdett's book first. The characters are a little wooden, although I do like Poke's cop friend Arthit. I like how the main character isn't too annoyingly righteous: he leaves a child porn-producing Australian's murderer unpunished and sells a woman who was a torturer for the Khmer Rouge to her victims. I didn't dislike Poke's girlfriend, former bar girl Rose who is trying to go legit with a maid business, and his would-be adopted daughter and former street orphan Miaow but I didn't feel like I really knew them so I just found them vaguely pleasant. I did like the tidbit about how Rose tore a tiny hole in her cigarette pack to worm her smokes out. It's a habit she learned in the bars so other people wouldn't hit her up for cigarettes. It's the small details that tip the balance.

Most of the writing is competent, if not that memorable. I did like this sequence near the end, a conversation between the American-born Poke and Arthit:

"You know what a cynic is?"

"Yes, Arthit. A cynic is a disappointed romantic."

"A cynic is somone who's been on the train too long."

"The train," Rafferty says, and waits for it.

"I've always wondered why people travel by train," Arthit says. "Trains invariably pass through the shabbiest, most wretched parts of cities. To someone who lived his entire life on a train, the world would seem to be long stretches of emptiness occasionally interrupted by patches of ugliness. Once in a while, you need to get off the train and see what the world's really like."

....

"All right, Arthit. You don't have to hammer it into my skull."

"Oh, I don't know." he slaps Rafferty's empty bottle against his palm. "Westerners seem to have difficulty with metaphors. I've often wondered whether it has something to do with the frontal lobe. your heads are shaped so oddly."

"Tell it to Isaac Newton."

There are two separate child porn plots in the story which was a lot of human nastiness to digest. But, it's a reality of Southeast Asia. I had a lot of trouble swallowing the denouement between Poke and the second kid he takes in, Superman, who was a friend of Miaow's when they were both street kids. Superman starts to trust him and then runs away because he finds explicit pictures of himself on a cd in Poke's laptop. Let me back up here:  In the course of looking for the missing Australian pervert, Poke finds a tower of CD's full of pictures he has taken of children. Bad pictures. And Superman is in the collection. Poke takes them home and puts them in his safe. He is in contact with an adoption agent who thinks he has found a school that will take Superman in but the agent wants some of the pictures to show them as..I dunno, evidence he has been abused? Why would anyone legitimately NEED to see those? And, even if I possessed such pictures and bought all of the above, I certainly wouldn't email them to someone. How would you ever explain that if the law came knocking? Especially in Southeast Asia where the judicial system can be questionable, let's say, and the prisons are the worst places on earth. And, really, gross.

Then again, Hallinan has lived in Thailand for years so he knows more than I do. But I do not buy this plot point which causes Superman (who comes home and goes to play Tetris and finds the CD still in the drive and rightly freaks out) to trash Poke's house and run off. Now he is convinced he must save his friend Miaow from him. Set up for the next book I suppose.

What I did like was the Buddhist ceremony to release Madame Wing's spirit at the end of the book, easily my favorite scene. It makes me curious to read two Western authors now speak in Thai Buddhist terms about hungry ghosts, aura and karmas. Do they get seduced or convinced by that world philosophy by living there or does it just make for good literary tropes?