Laundry Man by Jake Needham ISBN 9789628631926 | Paperback | Chameleon Press | March 2002 | HK$129 Buy this book from Paddyfield.com

Welcome to Bangkok. Half Miami, half Beirut, and all Blade Runner country after midnight. In LAUNDRY MAN Jake Needham takes you behind Thailand's smiling face and introduces a hero you have to cheer for, the urbane and straight-shooting Jack Shepherd. Once a high-flying international lawyer, a renowned expert on global money laundering, Jack has happily swapped the fierce intrigue of Washington, DC for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok. Now he's just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in an unimportant city. Or is he? A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd is a man perpetually tantalized by the moral labyrinth that bedevils all western expatriates in Asia. An international bank collapses under dubious circumstances; a law partner killed two years ago abruptly reappears; prominent members of the financial community die spectacular deaths; and a twisting trail of treachery and corruption leads Jack Shepherd from Manila to Bangkok to Hong Kong to the jet-set resort island of Phuket, and ultimately all the way back to the life he thought he'd left behind in Washington -- perhaps even straight into the White House itself.

Author's Web Site Review: The Asian Review of Books