Cambodia noir A novel

Review by 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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Cambodia Noir DIARY June 28, 2003 Airports kill me. I need to stop thinking about Paris, which is close to impossible at the best of times. But in the farthest wing of Frankfurt terminal, a couple of hours before dawn, as I'm waiting for a plane to carry me away to a city whose name I cannot properly pronounce . . . well, it's a terrible place to be alone with one's thoughts. The lights went dim sometime after two, taking the incessant chatter of Sky News with them, so I have no way of knowing quite what time it is. It feels like the heat's gone, too, and I'm sitting wrapped like a bonbon in souvenir scarves, scribbling nonsense. For the first hour or so I kept my eyes closed and tried to picture beautiful things: the quiet terraces of Machu Picchu at dawn, or the minarets of Istanbul from the window of a descending plane. But all I could see were the catacombs, with their walls of silent skulls and femurs. In the air-conditioned chill, I felt like I was still down there, rubbing elbows with six million Parisian dead. It was peaceful. No war or massacre filled these halls with bones: they were carted here at night to clear out the city's teeming cemeteries. In one spot, where the remains didn't quite reach the low ceiling, someone had installed electric lamps on a wire, so you could see how far back the charnel house went: row upon row upon row, under glowing bulbs that swept into the dark like the lights of the Vincent Thomas Bridge. . . . That's when I smelled it: that perfume, like copper and roses, saturating the air around me, and my eyes snapped open. There was no one there, of course: just an airport, scented with nothing but industrial-strength cleanser and heartbreaking loneliness. I have to think about something else! Write something. Anything . . . eeny-meeny-miney-moe . . . Keeping this journal is supposed to . . . I don't know, make me aware or mindful or something. These days I'm not certain that's such a good idea. A lot of my life would be better off forgotten. Perhaps I can find a certain ink that will fade, slowly, into the cream of the paper, taking all my history with it. Or just a marker: I can be like the post office girls in the war, inking out indiscretions from soldiers' mash notes and love letters. My diary will read like the NSA's Greatest Hits: page after page of neat black lines. I've written things here I've never said out loud, things I've barely dared to think. Surely I could put down why I had to leave Paris? But you would just think I was being ridiculous. Someday you'll read this, laughing, shaking your head at the silly girl you used to be. You'll wrack your brain, totally unable to imagine where you were when you wrote it, or what you might have been thinking. Isn't that what I'm hoping for, really, as I fill these blank pages? They hold the promise of that day: when I will be long gone, and you will have forgotten what it's like to be haunted. Excerpted from Cambodia Noir: A Novel by Nick Seeley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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