Street Music
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. That family has weathered extreme challenges—each of its three members carried the scars of a painful and dangerous history—but has stuck together with tenacity and love (and a little help from some friends).
Now that family is in jeopardy: the birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces—and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edgar finalist Hallinan's disappointing ninth and last thriller set in Thailand and featuring expat American writer Poke Rafferty (after 2017's Fools' River) finally addresses how Miaow, Poke's adopted daughter, came to be abandoned and tied to a Bangkok bus bench, where he found her in 2007's A Nail Through the Heart. But first much is made of Poke's adjusting to being a biological father and teenage Miaow preparing to portray Eliza Doolittle in a school production of Pygmalion. A subplot about the disappearance of a friend, whose apartment is ominously filled with blood, goes nowhere. Well into the novel, Rafferty encounters Hom, "a filthy, ragged woman... crying her heart out," who knows about Miaow's past and with whom Miaow has a predictable connection. Best are the sections told from Hom's perspective, in which Hallinan sympathetically presents her desperate attempts to stay alive and her shame about the choices she has made. Atmosphere and character overwhelm the plot. Series fans will best appreciate this one.
