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Serpentine: A short story from the world of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust

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He later published hundreds of articles in national general-interest magazines and wrote 25 Western novels, including “Range Drifter,” “Shadow of the Butte” and “Bitter Water. In all, in a fifteen month period, it is estimated he killed 10 people in Thailand, Nepal, India and Afghanistan, though the numbers are probably higher.

When beginning to compile a list of books read, this is the first title on my bookshelf to catch my eye. The payoff of the upstairs neighbour and the civil servant, who through pure efficiency final nail a truly desperate (and by then fairly stupid) Sobhraj to the post is great reading. Which, is kind of rediculous since when he finishes the novel, there might as well be a giant THE END? Maybe to cover his tracks or to keep the police from his trail, Charles had a femme fatale in tow (one of many) in french / Canadian Marie-Andree Leclerc, who acted as his wife, and an eventual accomplice (although she feigned innocence through trial).

An utterly villainous and sickening story of a man who has/had (jail permitting) the power and the potency to fool anyone of us. This book however is really long and several times I was tempted to skip through chapters to the end. He often hosted parties in his Bangkok home, where he met with the potential victims he had befriended. As always, I immediately downloaded the most popular book about the case and reviewed it for vivalabooks. Some of those successes—the toughest ones—have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware.

In the meantime he married a French woman, Chantal, had a child with her and the three of them traveled throughout Europe and Asia. The subject of this book, Charles Sobhraj, is confirmed to have taken the lives of over a dozen tourists throughout Asia in the 1970s. Song tried to raise her son alone in French Saigon at the time, when she met a French Lieutenant who was willing to marry Song and bring her to Paris along with Charles. For any of you that have had parents warn about the dangers of traveling to Asia you’re contemplating, alone or maybe with friends or someone you’re dating, this guy was the worst of worst nightmares come true. Though his first killing was most likely that of an unlucky taxi driver, he generally sought out young Westerners who he befriended, plied with food and drink laced with barbituates, and then robbed of jewelry, passports, valuables and money.In masterly fashion Thompson examines the lives not only of the intelligent, charismatic, conscienceless and thoroughly dangerous Sobhraj but also of the unsuspecting victims that he drugged, robbed, sometimes tortured and without a qualm killed. Honestly, the author will make you sit through 50+ pages on the life story of a girl whose father sold the killer a watch one time, including the date of her marriage, names of kids, and how much she had in a 401k, even though it leads nowhere! 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. Charles angry that Chantal was able to escape him, swore that he will find her and bring his daughter back to him.

This book was written in 1979 and details the murders as committed by Charles Sobhraj throughout Asia. I struggled with the monotonous and matter-of-fact writing style which did not veer far from direct speech and few dispersed descriptions. I still can't believe that this one person was capable of so much evil and wickedness and yet was able to outwit his captors for so long.His only weakness was a penchant for gambling and his ego, both of which may have led him back to Nepal where the criminal cases against him had never been officially closed. Thompson wrote one novel, Celebrity (1982), which was on the national best-seller list for six months. Over several months in late 1975 and early 1976, the French serial killer (although of Asian and Indian descent) murdered tourists on the ‘hippie trail’. The most shocking thing about this man was how during his killing years, many countries seemed more concerned with getting him out of their country rather than putting him in prison for life. He had this aura of wealth, spoke four or five different languages, and he flashed gold watches and jewelry.

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