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Summary
Summary
A Booklist Best Crime Fiction Debut of 2016
A high-octane thriller with a heart-stopping conclusion about a mysterious American woman who disappears into the Cambodian underworld, and the photojournalist who tracks her through the clues left in her diary.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia: The end of the line. Lawless, drug-soaked, forgotten--it's where bad journalists go to die. For once-great war photographer Will Keller, that's kind of a mission statement: he spends his days floating from one score to the next, taking any job that pays; his nights are a haze of sex, drugs, booze, and brawling. But Will's spiral toward oblivion is interrupted by Kara Saito, a beautiful young woman who shows up and begs Will to help find her sister, June, who disappeared during a stint as an intern at the local paper.
There's a world of bad things June could have gotten mixed up in. The Phnom Penh underworld is in an uproar after a huge drug bust; a local reporter has been murdered in a political hit; and the government and opposition are locked in a standoff that could throw the country into chaos at any moment. Will's best clue is June's diary: an unsettling collection of experiences, memories, and dreams, reflecting a young woman at once repelled and fascinated by the chaos of Cambodia. As Will digs deeper into June's past, he uncovers one disturbing fact after another about the missing girl and her bloody family history. In the end, the most dangerous thing in Cambodia may be June herself.
Propulsive, electric, and filled with unforgettable characters, Cambodia Noir marks the arrival of a fresh new talent. Nick Seeley is an ambitious, wildly imaginative author and his enthralling debut explores what happens when we venture into dark places...when we get in over our heads...and when we get lost.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Seeley makes his fiction debut with a dark thriller set in Cambodia in 2003. June Saito, an American photographer and journalist based in Phnom Penh, disappears after a major drug bust throws the Cambodian military, police force, and members of the capital's criminal class into a mad scramble for power. June's sister, Kara Saito, hires photojournalist Will Keller to look for her. Excerpts from June's diaries chronicle her descent into sadomasochism as an escape from personal trauma. Will is a tough guy with a drug habit and a guilty secret of his own. He uses his search for June, which leads to an underworld of drugs, violence, and sexual vice, to try to put a check on his own self-destructive behavior and find new meaning for his dissipated life. Readers should be prepared for oblique cultural references and vague aphorisms that needlessly encumber an otherwise compelling story of depravity and redemption with echoes of Twin Peaks and the bleakest works of Jim Thompson. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A drug-, booze-, life-, and love-addled freelance photographer pursues a missing woman through a phantasmic Cambodia in this debut thriller. If ever a case was made for place as character in a novel, Seeley makes it here with scene after nightmarish scene set in Phnom Penh's dive bars, seedy hotels, and teeming, treacherous streets and, as well, in the surrounding dark jungles. A journalist whose work in Southeast Asia included a stint in Phnom Penh in 2003, Seeley bases his plot, which he describes as a "fantastical backstory," on actual events involving drug busts and police and political corruption. His narrator and protagonist, haunted journalist Will Keller, numbs emotional wounds in Cambodia's "educational system": "cocaine at night; yaba before dawn, sucked down in acrid curls of smoke; beer and blinding sunrise." That Keller survives his nonstop drugging and boozing and remains powerfully fit, ready to thwart gun- and knife-point attacks, strains credulity, but Seeley's labyrinthine puzzle keeps the reader following along. The setup is pure Chandler: a Japanese woman"black hair," "antique ivory" skinappears "like Venus out of the sea." The woman begs Keller to find her sister June, a journalist, who has disappeared. For reasons later made clearin one of the plot's big and harrowing revealsKeller feels compelled to take the case. From a photo of June the sister shows him, the journalist realizes June was an intern at the paper where he works. She also sublet his flat, leaving behind a diary, which Keller mines for clues to her whereabouts. Keller's search turns to a roster of treacherous and violent charactershis co-workers at the paper, the police, and drug lordswhom he follows in tense, violent, and suspenseful scenes. It's amazing that from this dark hell, Seeley pulls off a resolution that's plausibly warm and optimistic.Generic title aside, this is distinctive work. The plotting is wily and entertaining, the take on Cambodia, trenchant and disturbing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* International journalist Seeley's debut novel puts the traditional noir story on 'roids. Whereas dark detective mysteries of the 1930s sent readers down mean streets with a depressed, alcoholic private eye as a guide, this tale is more like an excursion through a makeshift hell a maze of bars, clubs, and shanties, with everything for sale and life held cheap. And the guide here? Will Keller is a burnout, a once-great war photographer who careens from drug to drug. It's 2003, and Keller now works for a tiny paper in Phnom Penh, dragging himself out of drug- or alcohol-induced stupors to cover whatever his editor throws his way. Keller has a sideline in finding people, based on his knowledge of Cambodia's dark places. A just-arrived American intern at the paper has disappeared; her sultry, Hammett-worthy sister asks Keller to find her. Some journals the intern left in a suitcase when she crashed at Keller's place are the only clues to her identity, which turns out to be a fluid one. Seeley alternates the girl's diary entries with Keller's point of view, ratcheting up the tension with each discovery. The fast-moving narrative is like riding through Phnom Penh's streets on the back of a motorcycle, as Keller does on his way to assignments. Seeley, himself a journalist in Cambodia in 2003, delivers an up-close, jarring look at a city rocked with unrest and an atmospheric take on that enduring noir protagonist, the dissolute foreign correspondent. A sinuous, shattering thriller.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2016 Booklist