by Timothy Hallinan. (Get the Book)All I wanted to do was paint my apartment, thinks Poke Rafferty after more than a week of evading capture by Bangkok's secret police. He has become a suspect in the War on Terror, hunted by police, who are concerned that Muslims have killed thousands of Buddhists in southern Thailand, and by an aging American whose appetite for torture and murder wasn't sated by the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program. Set against actual strife in the south and the epochal 2011 monsoon that nearly drowned all of Bangkok, Hallinan's latest surpasses his last Rafferty thriller, the Edgar-nominated The Queen of Patpong (2010). The plot is straightforward until Poke learns that Murphy, the American, is a monster who killed women and children as easily as Vietcong agents. But it becomes more complex when he hires two former Russian spies to help him and reluctantly accepts assistance from his 17-year-old half-sister, Ming Li. The Russians' first loyalty may be to money, and Poke wishes that Ming Li were safely home in Virginia. All of Hallinan's characters are multifaceted and compelling, but his villains are exceptional; and the volcanic American sadist is the author's best yet. Poke's ongoing melancholy over his daughter's adolescent angst remains knowing, and here it serves as a reader's respite from the book's myriad tensions. The Fear Artist is simply the best of a fine series of thrillers set in one of the world's most exotic locales. --Booklist
