Book #25: Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne
Number of pages: 360
This book is about a man called Robert, on an extended trip to Cambodia, who - against the warnings of his guide - goes off with an American called Simon. My guess was that there would be some sort of unpleasant consequence, and after an evening playing cards with Simon, Robert wakes up to find himself being taken away in a boat, and that Simon had taken his clothes and rucksack.
However, instead of ending up in any immediate danger, Robert checks into a hotel room and ends up responding to a man's advertisement asking for an English teacher for his (presumably adult) daughter Sophal, who he falls in love with. When Simon is next mentioned, it becomes appaerent that he is trying to evade a group of people he has upset (related mostly to drugs trafficking as I understood it).
The opening to this story felt promising; I had been led to believe that it was going to involve a British tourist ending up in all sorts of trouble with drug dealers, but maybe I misread the book recommendation that convinced me to buy it. This felt principally like a romance novel between Robert and Sophal, although there was a growing threat from a corrupt cop who was after Robert's casino winnings.
I felt that this book was a bit difficult to follow at times, largely because of characters occasionally being referred to as "he" or "she", making it difficult for me to know who the author was talking about. Another issue I had came from the fact that Robert started referring to himself as "Simon", and that was the name Sophal called him by, so at times he would be referred to in the same chapter as both Robert and Simon. Having two characters referred to by the same name isn't really a great idea, even if the whole point is that one character has started pretending to be the other.
I was hoping for there to be more of a threat from the character who was targeting them, but at the end I felt that the book was not what I'd expected it to be, despite a few unexpected plot twists near the end.
Overall, I didn't think this was a great book; it did a good job of completely subverting my expectations, but often not in a good way, although at least it did give some depth to its characters by giving all of them quite detailed backstories.
Next book: Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (Nabeel Qureshi)