A
man, disappeared from a city that never knew he existed.
A boy, grievously hurt, who everyone called
Superman.
Bangkok, the glittering center of a
country full of ghosts.
Travel writer
Poke Rafferty is good at looking for trouble—so good he
makes his living writing offbeat travel guides for the young
and terminally bored. His Looking for Trouble series
is for travelers obsessed with the unusual: how to beat
official foreign-exchange rates; how to spot fake amber or
counterfeit money; how much to bribe a cop; how to identify
a transvestite before it's too late; and how to know, within
an hour of arriving in a strange city, where to find the
best bars, the best clubs, the best food, the best clothes,
and the dodgiest entertainment at the best prices.
Then Rafferty falls in love with Rose, an ex-Patpong Road
bar girl, and he badly wants to be a part of her new life.
Both Rose and Bangkok itself have stolen his heart. To
complete his new family, Rafferty is in the process of
adopting a wary eight-year-old street orphan when trouble
comes looking for him.
First he takes in another
orphan, a troubled and terrifying street urchin nicknamed
Superman. Then he agrees to find a distraught woman's
missing uncle, a task that seems simple enough given the
uncle's predilections for just the kind of shadowy places
Rafferty knows well. Finally, in a moment of weakness, he
accepts an old woman's generous payment in exchange for
locating a blackmailing thief. Soon, these three seemingly
disparate events begin to overlap, pulling Rafferty deeper
into dark, unfamiliar terrain, and he begins to realize that
some people guard unspeakable secrets that don't always show
on their faces—and that all this time he's been gliding
across the surface of a culture he doesn't understand.
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