A Nail Through the Heart
An eye-opening account of the real Bangkok is the setting for Timothy Hallinan’s latest, A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART. Poke Rafferty writes travel books – the kind of which search out the seedier side of cities. He’s a ex-pat living in Bangkok with his girlfriend, Rose, a former go-go girl who gave up that life to be with him. A quasi-family unit is formed with a little girl named Miaow, a former street kid for whom Poke has made it his priority to keep safe and try and adopt her.
Things are going on like usual for Poke until he is contacted by an Australian woman who is search of her uncle. She thinks Poke can help her because of a cop friend of his who has vouched for him as someone who’s trustworthy and won’t lead her on a wild goose chase, unlike the two cops she has been paying up to this point.
Running concurrently with that storyline is that of a mysterious woman named Madame Wing, who seems to scare the crap out of most people who talk about her. She’s the type who has the money to make her problems go away, until something very important to her is stolen and she wants it back. Poke gets suckered into a deal with her because of his investigation into the missing uncle.
The people Poke deals with are some of the lowest scum on earth. When Poke finds out exactly what the uncle was up to, he doesn’t know if he should continue. And Madame Wing’s secret is just as bad! Besides that, Miaow has brought home one of her former friends from her street days: a guy who goes by the name of Superman, is scary in his own right, and has a past he wants no one to know.
Hallinan has crafted such a dicey situation for Poke that if you were in his position, you wouldn’t know what to do. It’s an unflinching look at a part of the world peppered with lowlifes who will exploit anyone to their advantage. Not some fun-in-the-sun read, NAIL deals with dark issues and makes you grateful for what you have. It’s a page-turner, alright, but into the darkest of hearts, with one man who makes it his mission to straighten out some of the problems, even knowing full well he can never make it perfect.
This is well worth the read, even though you will feel like you need a wire brush to scrub some of it off of you. Some of its characters make the pedophiles on DATELINE’s “To Catch a Predator” segment look like Mister Rogers. –Bruce Grossman
Nice review, Bruce.
It’s so funny for me to see people still writing books like this set in Bangkok. Sure, it can be seedy, like lots of big cities, but it’s mostly safe and fun. Good books in this vein thrive on sinister settings, whether it be Raymond Chandler’s LA or Robert B. Parker’s Boston, so I have nothing against books like A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART (in fact, I’ll probably buy it today), but the typical Bangkok setting is becoming kind of laughable, in my opinion.