To those of you not terribly interested in reading after getting an overview, I can’t say I blame you. At his bedside were Robert Lantz, his agent of 15 years, and his two college-age sons, Kirk and Scott. The cold case soon turns interesting as the team connect the seemingly unbelievable coincidences to discover that most characters are not who they seem.

Sobraj was born in April 1944, the illegitimate son of a poor Vietnamese girl and an Indian tailor who lived in Saigon. Richie: The Ultimate Tragedy Between One Decent Man and the Son He Loved (1973) was the story of a Long Island man who killed his drug-addicted son. This was the Manson family without the hippies, this was the Manson family ready to wage war on the hippies through, a different sort of means. On the one hand, it is exceptionally written and weaves a winding tale that hooks you in as a reader.The author has such an omniscient style of adding sharp jabs of morality intermixed with a hands-off 'this happened - what can be added by stating anything other than the sordid facts' manner of writing. I had friends who were traveling the world at these exact times in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in many of the very countries and cities Charles Sobhraj was finding his prey.

Some actual knowledge of the nature of psychopathy and the sort of people targeted by psychopaths is a necessary footnote to this kind of book. While fog may have lain heavy in the communities around and over the water on Lake Washington, that body of water is insufficient to create a weather event in Queen Anne. Thompson does a great job of painting the full picture of the man from the beginning of his life until he was caught and imprisoned. The two main characters, Milos Sturgis and Alex Delaware, worked well together and I enjoyed the insightful feedback from both the detective’s view and psychologist’s experience. Journeying back and forth over half the globe - from the boulevards of Paris to the slopes of Mount Everest to the underbellies of Bangkok and Hong Kong - Sobhraj left in his wake a trail of baffling mystery and inexplicable horror.In the meantime he married a French woman, Chantal, had a child with her and the three of them traveled throughout Europe and Asia.