Review: THE DYING BEACH, Angela Savage

• MFormat: Kindle (Amazon)
  
• File Size: 417 KB
• Print Length: 236 pages
• Publisher: Text Publishing (June 26, 2013)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00CGKQR3G

Synopsis (Amazon)

A new case for expat private investigator Jayne Keeney.

As Jayne and Rajiv holiday in Krabi, Jayne can't stop her mind straying to thoughts of the future: a successful business, perhaps even a honeymoon. Who would have thought she could be so content?
But then their tour guide's body is found floating in the shallows and no one can explain the marks around her neck.

Jayne and Rajiv are pulled into a case that the police have already decided isn't one: a case that will pull at the seams of their fledgling relationships and lead Jayne into grave danger.

Angela Savage is a Melbourne-based crime writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. Her first novel, Behind the Night Bazaar, won the 2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. She is a winner of the Scarlett Stiletto Award and has twice been shortlisted for Ned Kelly awards.

My Take

Jayne and Rajiv's newly formed partnership of Keeney and Patel, private investigators, is severely tested when they agree to investigate the suspicious death of their tour guide. Jayne is really too used to making decisions without reference to others. Rajiv on the other hand believes Jayne is far too impulsive and doesn't take into account the costs of the time she spends investigating. Jayne is only too willing to admit that she has made almost no profit as a private investigator so far.

The novel is set against economic and social issues besetting modern Thailand, particularly foreign and Thai businessmen trying to make quick profits without due consideration of the environmental impacts of their schemes. Villagers too are losing traditional rights when incomers seize on land that appears to belong to no-one. Others are worried by Thai locals becoming so heavily reliant on tourist income, and by the almost automatic degradation of the local way of life.

I was impressed in this novel by the author's empathetic depiction of village life and of Thai customs, of the responsibility felt by village elders, as well as the detailed explanation of the social and economic issues surrounding the murders. Angela Savage takes us a little away from the beaten track, out of Bangkok, to areas that have tourist potential, but where change/modernisation will come at a price.

I've included this novel in my list for the 2014 Global Reading Challenge in Asia (Thailand).

My rating: 4.5

I also reviewed  4.5, THE HALF-CHILD

Review: THE HALF-CHILD, Angela Savage

Publisher: Text Publishing Melbourne Australia 2010
ISBN:978-1-921656-54-5
322 pages
Source: Local Library

Publisher's blurb
Jayne Keeney is a fiesty thirty-something Aussie who has been living in Bangkok for many years. She has been hired to investigate the alleged suicide of a young Australian woman in a seedy Thai coastal town. Maryanne Delbeck was happy and harmless, her father refuses to believe she took her own life. Jayne immerses herself in the case, navigating the backstreet world of Thai ladyboys, monks, strippers, expats and corrupt officials.
Maryanne’s death is not the only mystery awaiting Jayne among Pattaya’s neon signs and go-go bars. While working undercover at the orphanage where Maryanne volunteered, Jayne discovers something far more sinister. Now her life is in danger, her case is still unsolved and she barely has time for dinner with her handsome new love interest, Rajiv. With love and death both circling, Jayne now has two cases to crack and very little time to do it.

My take:

Maryanne Delbeck was a twenty-one-year old Australian volunteer working for Young Christian Volunteers in Bangkok. The year is 1996. Less than five months after her arrival in Thailand Maryanne jumped from a hotel rooftop in Pattaya, falling fourteen storeys to her death. She had found work at the New Life Child Centre in Pattaya, an orphanage that prepares babies for international adoption.

Jayne Keeney decides the best way to investigate what caused Maryanne to jump is to volunteer at the orphanage herself.  In her gathering of relevant information she calls in favours from a friend at the Australian Embassy, from a new Indian friend Rajiv, and from Police Major General Wichit whom she assisted in a case involving his own daughter. As Jayne extends her net she realises she is looking at something much more organised than a young woman's suicide.

I'm not an expert in Thai culture by any means but I have been to Thailand several times in the last 30 years, and spent time not only in Bangkok but also Chiang Mai and Kanchanaburi. Angela Savage's settings and descriptions rang very true for me, and I thought a very credible flavour of Thailand came through.

The plot in THE HALF-CHILD is very credible, and well threaded. Angela Savage shows how a crime fiction author can get under the skin of another culture, and focus on social issues as well as a crime fiction theme.
A very good read from an Australian author worth your while to look for. I think you can read these books out of order - I had rather hazy memories of the previous title in the series, BEHIND THE NIGHT BAZAAR. See my mini review below.

My rating: 4.5

About Angela Savage (from Text Publishing)
Angela Savage travelled to Laos on a six-month scholarship in 1992 and ended up staying in Asia for six years. She was based in Vientiane, then Hanoi and Bangkok where she set up and headed the Australian Red Cross HIV/AIDS subregional program. Her love affair with Asia continues and she has returned many times since. Behind the Night Bazaar won the 2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Angela lives in Melbourne.

Angela Savage writes (on her blog) about the launch of THE HALF-CHILD

Mini-review of
BEHIND THE NIGHT BAZAAR  (published 2006) My rating 4.5
Jayne Keeney, fluent in Thai language, is an Australian private investigator living in Bangkok. Her last investigation into a marital infidelity resulted in her being severely wounded and two weeks later, stitches out, she has arranged to visit her friend Didier de Montpasse living in Chiang Mai. Didier is gay and works on an HIV/AIDS awareness program. He and Jayne get on very well, drawn together by a love of crime fiction. Jayne and Didier go to meet someone in a gay bar behind the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai. There Didier has an argument with his Thai lover who has a gambling problem. Later that night Nou, Didier’s lover, is discovered dead, in the bar, butchered and mutilated. Soon Didier is also dead, shot at home by the police who say he was attempting to escape arrest. Jayne is determined to prove Didier’s innocence and to find out who really killed Nou. The content of story seems to stem from Savage’s own experience in South East Asia when she worked for the Australian Red Cross in setting up an HIV/AIDS program in Bangkok. In some senses it presents a stereo-typed view of Thailand, particularly of Bangkok and Chang Mai, where the under-age sex industry seems to flourish, with Australians amongst those who feed it. On the other hand, there is an unmistakeable tone of authenticity, raising issues that we need to think about.
A Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Winner in 2004, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Best First Crime Fiction in 2007.

I am going to "count" THE HALF-CHILD in

• Aussie Author Challenge
• 2011 Global Reading Challenge (Asia - Thailand)

Australian Crime Fiction Snapshots - # 6

The 6th batch of these interviews, the result of a collaboration between Karen Chisholm (of the Aust Crime Fiction weblog), Damien Gay (of Crime DownUnder) and Perry Middlemiss (of Matilda).

Check out the previous 31 Australian crime fiction authors listed last week in this amazing project.

• Sandy Curtis - on Crime Down Under
• Angela Savage - on Crime Down Under
• Michael Robotham - on Crime Down Under
• Mark Abernethy - on Crime Down Under
• James Phelan - on Crime Down Under
  

Aust Crime Fiction took it all one step further and asked its band of reviewers (including me) with the same questions:

• Sunnie
• Sally
  
• Helen
  
• Andrea
  
• Karen
• Kerrie
  

Set in Thailand

It occurred to me, when I was reading Timothy Hallinan's A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, that I have read other books which relate to Thailand and even to similar themes.

So here they are. The third is an Australian author. You might like to suggest others

BLINDFOLD GAME by Dana Stabenow
Quite an exciting read. Two men involved in setting up a terrorist bomb in a tourist area in Thailand in late 2004 decide to explode a dirty bomb over Anchorage, Alaska. The US Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth protects the US waters in the Bering Strait and seems to be busier than usual. Sarah Lange, estranged wife of CIA Agent Hugh Rincon, is the Executive Officer of the the cutter. When Hugh hears rumours of the dirty bomb, he realises that Sara's boat is in the area which the bombers are targeting.
My rating 4.5

FATAL REMEDIES by Donna Leon
University lecturer Paola, Commissario Brunetti's wife, is a person of strong convictions. When she throws a rock through the front window of a Venetian travel agency in the middle of the night, not once but twice, because it arranges sex tours to Thailand, she gets not only herself into trouble but Brunetti as well. The owner of the travel agency's premises, who is also the owner of a pharmaceutical company, seems inordinately interested in having the matter hushed up, at the same time as making Paola pay damages. Brunetti's boss Vice-Questore Patta sends Brunetti home on "administrative leave" until the matters are resolved. And then the owner, Mitri, is discovered murdered, garrotted, and Brunetti is summoned back to work. Once again Leon has chosen, in this #8 in her 17 Brunetti titles, to not only provide the reader with a series of puzzles, but to highlight an issue of international concern, placing Venice on an international stage. Brunetti and Paola are wonderful characters as is Signora Elettra, Patta's secretary and computer sleuth.
My rating 4.6

BEHIND THE NIGHT BAZAAR by Angela Savage
Jayne Keeney, fluent in Thai language, is an Australian private investigator living in Bangkok. Her last investigation into a marital infidelity resulted in her being severely wounded and two weeks later, stitches out, she has arranged to visit her friend Didier de Montpasse living in Chiang Mai. Didier is gay and works on an HIV/AIDS awareness program. He and Jayne get on very well, drawn together by a love of crime fiction. Jayne and Didier go to meet someone in a gay bar behind the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai. There Didier has an argument with his Thai lover who has a gambling problem. Later that night Nou, Didier’s lover, is discovered dead, in the bar, butchered and mutilated. Soon Didier is also dead, shot at home by the police who say he was attempting to escape arrest. Jayne is determined to prove Didier’s innocence and to find out who really killed Nou. The content of story seems to stem from Savage’s own experience in South East Asia when she worked for the Australian Red Cross in setting up an HIV/AIDS program in Bangkok. In some senses it presents a stereo-typed view of Thailand, particularly of Bangkok and Chang Mai, where the under-age sex industry seems to flourish, with Australians amongst those who feed it. On the other hand, there is an unmistakeable tone of authenticity, raising issues that we need to think about.
A Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Winner in 2004, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Best First Crime Fiction in 2007
My rating 4.5