When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead--a suicide--in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the...

When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke during the Great Recession, he takes a job training the Haitian police for the United Nations. He s sent to the remote town of Jeremie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town s complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. But when Terry falls in love with the judge's wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster.

Edgy,...