Book Review
Title: The Cambodian Book of the Dead (Detective Maier Mystery Book 1) by Tom Vater
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Rating: 4.25 Stars
I recently read both The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu and Kolkata Noir by Tom Vater and really enjoyed them both so I was looking forward to getting into The Cambodian Book of the Dead and maybe the rest of the series. We are introduced to Maier who is a war correspondent in Cambodia as the war is coming to an end in 1997 with his friend and guide, Hort. They are discussing Hort’s upcoming wedding when a bomb intended for Maier kills his friend and causes him to leave his job and return to Germany. The war finally ended in 1998, but Maier now a private detective couldn’t care about it. We are also introduced to the widow, Dani Stricker, after the death of her husband, Harald who is from Cambodia as she hires as assassin to find someone presumably responsible for the death of her family as he wants revenge. When we get back to Maier he is once again heading for Cambodia this time to track down and observe a Hamburg heir who is living there after being hired by the young man’s mother.
So far, I did find the story interesting and the characters were likeable and I was excited to see where Vater was going to take this and I hoped it would be in a similar direction to Kolkata Noir as I loved that book. Upon returning to Cambodia, Maier ends up meeting up with a woman from his past, Carissa who never left Cambodia and helps him integrate to the way the country has changed since he was last there. However, he soon learns the boy he is there to keep an eye on, his British business partner, Pete is mixed up with Tep and the Cambodia gang called Angkar who were responsible for a lot of murders and killings during the war. This section consists of a lot of drinking, drugs and killing probably to introduce the realities of living in Cambodia even after the war ended but it didn’t feel like anything was really happening right now. That being said we know Maier has to be careful because people asking too many questions might find themselves vanishing into the night so he has to be cautious when getting his information. I think this is going to be more of a domestic thriller, crime novel lacking the sci-fi elements of Kolkata Noir which I wasn’t too pleased about but that might change as the novel progresses.
As we cross the quarter mark in the novel, I was getting a little confused as Maier seems to be getting down deeper into the seedy underbelly of Cambodia rather than focusing on his original task. He does end up meeting Rolf and going diving with him and he observes that Rolf and Pete couldn’t be more different and there does seem to be some tension between them. Rolf even mentions wanting to sell his shares of the business but he hasn’t and the reasons for this choice we don’t get to know yet. We are still a point in the novel where things don’t make complete sense yet but Vater might just be holding off until later in the novel to build suspense and tension but I was hoping for more in the action or something to drive the plot forward. One thing I was enjoying was how big a role history is playing in the novel. The past doesn’t stay in the past and our personal pasts shape our individual futures and that is something Vater is effortlessly getting across no matter what character we are focusing on, he easily finds way for the character’s history to influence their present and it is obvious to see in some and less obvious in others. Kaley was an interesting character as she seems complete real but there are questions raised around this but I want to see where that goes before I comment on it.
As we cross into the halfway mark in the novel, Maier is getting deeper and deeper into the crime circle and the man at the heart of it all. Kaley also seems to be playing a larger role than I first thought and when Maier heads to meet Tep on his island for the first time, Maier has a feeling that he might be walking into a trap but he doesn’t have much choice if he is going to solve the mysteries he has been presented with. I did find myself getting a bit frustrated with the novel as it is presenting more questions than answers and I really wanted something solid to follow but I do adore Vater’s writing style. Vater has the ability to make you continue reading stringing out little hints and clues while keeping the substantial information hidden until he wants to present it to the reader. That being said, I am still not sure what the end game is, Vater has presented a large crime network which Maier is currently in the middle of but he also presented Maier’s original goals of getting Rolf out of Cambodia but he is stuck right now.
After the halfway mark things really begin to pick up and it seems that things are starting to come together. Maier is kidnapped by Tep and his people meaning his feeling he was walking into a trap was right but he didn’t have a choice. Over the next few days Maier is tortured by Tep’s people because they believe he is a journalist or working for an intelligence agency when it couldn’t be farther from the truth. By the time they take Maier to die he is rescued by a young girl who has found Kaley’s sister in the newspaper. Dani is Kaley’s sister and upon returning to Cambodia is ignores the warning of the hitman she hired and ends up dead herself which brings that plot line to an end. However, Maier has realised that Rolf is wrapped up in this and his employer has given Maier a week to remove Rolf from Cambodia once and for all or they will send someone to replace him as things are getting very dangerous. Maier like the readers, has almost put all the pieces together but it still feels like we are missing one or two vital pieces of information for everything to make sense but I am getting excited to see how Vater brings the novel to its conclusion.
After escaping from Tep with help and finally putting the pieces together, Maier knows he has to confront Tep to really find out the truth about everything that has happened and everything he has discovered throughout the course of the novel. Maier doesn’t do this lightly, in fact, he takes precautions to arm himself accordingly before heading out to the island once more but he is once again captured by the head torturer known as The White Spider. Rather than just killing Maier, The White Spider wants to use him as a biographer for his life story which ties into Maier’s as they are both German. The man explains how he started in the Hitler Youth and eventually moved onto the SS during the Second World War and how he delighted in killing people even both of his wives. During this time Carissa has also been captured and the man is using her as motivation for Maier to write his story accurately and with flair but it doesn’t seem like Carissa or Maier is going to make it out of this situation alive and if they do I will be very surprised. It seems like the sequence of events we have been following are irrelevant as they are the desires of men who were born and bred in violence and want that to continue. The White Spider even explains after getting German citizenship again after the war didn’t satisfy him because Germany in his eyes had become soft and safe and wasn’t the environment he wanted to be in so he came to one of the most dangerous countries in the world and put his skills to good use in Cambodia.
The final section of the novel did resolve all the questions that Vater puts to us, the readers, over the course of the novel but personally it felt a little longwinded for me. I loved the characters, the use of history and mythology and how they tied everything together and the action was great. I just felt the novel didn’t need to be over 400 pages long for the conclusion we got which was a little anticlimactic for me. That being said, I liked it a tiny bit more than The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu but it wasn’t as good as Kolkata Noir for me personally. I would recommend it to people who like gritty crime novels with a noir feel to them with a lot of focus on history, mythology and cultural ideologies.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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