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Behind the Night Bazaar by Angela Savage is thoroughly enjoyable: enlightening, tense and evocative.

 

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About the book

It’s 1996 and Jayne Keeney has fled her native Australia to live in Bangkok, where she works as a PI. It proves a handy skill when her dearest friend is accused of murdering his lover and then shot while ‘evading’ police. Jayne’s investigation takes her to Chiang Mai and puts herself and those who help her in danger. The deeper she gets, the more she has to rely on her wits and ‘Farang’ ways to stay alive.

My Thoughts

Behind the Night Bazaar reveals Thai culture and the sex trade in an unflinching but sympathetic light: these are people who exploit the little they have to stay alive. The foreign tourists who use them don’t get such sympathy—certainly not from this reader. Jayne is liberal minded, generous and opinionated, and her love for her adopted country and its people, particularly those shunned by society, shines. While Jayne Keeney carries the bulk of the narration, Savage uses multiple viewpoints to show not just the conflict between the characters but the competing goals behind them. For me, this somewhat diminished the possible suspense, yet the mystery behind the murders and the insight into another culture is so riveting it didn’t matter. The socio-political landscape shapes the story and the necessary explanations could have overwhelmed the mystery. They don’t. Culture, politics and backstory are handled well and add dimension to the narrative and to Jayne’s character. That complexity and the conflicting but equally defended goals of all major characters are one of this novel’s strengths.

Rich in complexity and utterly entertaining, Behind the Night Bazaar is highly recommended for all those crime lovers looking for stories with strong heroines and a vivid sense of place.

About the Author

Angela Savage is a Melbourne-based crime writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. Her crime fiction novels are set in Thailand and feature Australian expat detective Jayne Keeney. The first book in the series Behind the Night Bazaar (Text, 2006) won the 2004 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript and was short-listed for the 2007 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book. The second book The Half-Child (Text, 2010), and third, The Dying Beach, were both shortlisted for Ned Kelly Awards for Best Crime Fiction, with The Dying Beach also shortlisted for the 2014 Davitt Award.

Read my review of Book 2: The Half-Child

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