Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
More info > http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-return-of-nick-sharman.html
Sarah Talbot Jennings (not her real name) arrives in Bangkok with just a bundle of stolen cash and newly dyed blonde hair. She takes an apartment at the Kingdom, a run down, once grand block of apartments in the middle of a massive building site, where anonymity seems guaranteed. There she falls in with Mali, part hipster, part hippie, and her acolytes, to play poker, drink, eat cake and take drugs. (Sounds pretty good to me)
Moving through the strange land she has ended up in, Sarah is touched spiritually, but her cynicism wins the day as she drifts into the web of the criminality that is an everyday fact in Thailand.
This is a beautifully written novel, as much literary as crime, though crimes feature from page one, just don’t expect doors being kicked open and men with guns running in. But that’s OK by me. It captures beautifully the mood of the city in the rainy season: hot, humid, with streets turned into rivers, as Sarah drifts through the days, partly guilty at how she got her money, and partly excited by the possibilities it gives her.
All is not well though in the city. Packs of dogs and packs of anti-government rioters roam on the outskirts of the Kingdom. Gunfire is heard, and the power is constantly interrupted leading to brownouts and blackouts which the buildings generators have trouble coping with. So the reader watches the gradual decline of Sarah into madness, as all around her the city’s society declines into anarchy.
The Glass Kingdom summons up the taste and smell of Bangkok, and captures the boho lifestyle perfectly, and the lifestyle of the Thai gentry, once rich, now locked into the fading grandeur of the blocks of apartments, pretty much as we’ve been locked in for the last few months. I enjoyed it immensely.
