Patpong, Bangkok’s most notorious district, is where Thailand’s infamous sex trade thrives. Poor girls from rural villages are lured there to become “bar girls” working solely to satisfy men’s sexual desires. Rose, one of those girls, is able to break free of the life when she marries Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer. With their adopted daughter Miaow they live a relatively quiet life, until one night a man from Rose’s past appears and shatters this existence by threatening to kill them all. It is up to Poke to stop him.

Hallinan writes action scenes as good as, if not better than, any thriller writer in the business today, and the beginning and ending of this exciting book belong to Poke. But it is the middle section, the heart, which grabs us and keeps us engrossed. Rose tells her story from the time she was a teenager in a poor village, through her “recruitment” as a bar girl, to her rise as the “Queen of Patpong,” where she meets Howard, a farong (foreigner). Rather than the hero she believes him to be, Howard is a serial killer who gets his kicks by murdering the girls he pursues. How Rose fights him off and escapes death is one of the most exciting, page turning episodes of this fast-paced book.

This is the fourth Poke Rafferty thriller and probably the best. Descriptions of the bar girls’ lives are beautifully and sympathetically done; depictions of village life is authentic yet depressing; action sequences are fast-paced and realistic; and the final face-off against Howard is edge-of-your-seat exciting. All in all, one hell of a fine book.