This book is more like a documentary of Charles Sobhraj’s life than a novel. The way Thomas Thompson has written it though, reads more like a murder novel. This book is the perfect accompaniment to the smash-hit BBC true crime drama and paints a portrait of a master manipulator psychopath who still resides in jail to this day.

One of the best ever true crime books I've read. How this author managed to know so much about this case is beyond me but the way he writes is so great. I loved everything of this book. It is so exiting and he brings you to another world,and you are never bored.According to Thompson's 1982 obit: "The lanky writer had been in a coma for several days and died at 3 a.m. in St. Vincent's Hospital, a hospital official said. At his bedside were Robert Lantz, his agent of 15 years, and his two college-age sons, Kirk and Scott. Others who have read this book have remarked how “impressed” by this pseudo-real life Hannibal Lector they are. Being well-read, psychologically overpowering and a self described “Übermensch” and all. LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis is a master detective. He has a near-perfect solve rate and he’s written his own rule book. Some of those successes—the toughest ones—have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware. But Milo doesn’t call Alex in unless cases are “different.” In this story, a teenage Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon revisit Trollesund, the Arctic town prominently featured in Northern Lights as the place of her first meeting with the aeronaut Lee Scoresby and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison. They seek the witch-consul Dr. Lanselius in the hope of finding answers to their ability to separate. [1] Audiobook [ edit ]

I read this book when it first came out (Jan. 1980)and got a signed copy just before I left on a trip around the world.I read this while traveling and by coincidence stayed at some of the places the killer/con man worked out of. This tale actually continued for many years after this book ended. Over the following years I read several news articles of Charles Sobhraj amazing escapes from prison. Written by Thomas Thompson, the author of "Blood and Money", this book is a bit longer than it maybe should have been, and the prose is a bit flowery. However, this is a pretty solid true-crime read. Thompson paints a vivid portrait of Sobhraj. Serpentine, a fantasy novella by Philip Pullman, is set after His Dark Materials and before the second book of The Book of Dust series. The manuscript was originally sold at a charity auction in 2004 and the book was publicly released in October 2020. [1] Origins [ edit ]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. The sentence as the epilogue is a joke of giant proportions. Serpentine boasts a set of delightful characters and an impressive plot. It kept my interest until the very end with a surprising reveal and promise for more action in the next book in the series. I struggled with the monotonous and matter-of-fact writing style which did not veer far from direct speech and few dispersed descriptions. I realise that this is the preferred style of the author however it didn’t suit many of the adrenaline filled scenes and often read too much like a movie or play script. He knew he was very ill, but he was absolutely determined to beat it," Lantz said. "Thank God it was very fast."

He was a co-founder and president in 1957 of Western Writers of America and later received two of that group’s Spur Awards for his writing. Thompson was a life member of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame."

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This murder warrants an immediate call. Milo’s independence has been compromised as never before, as the department pressures him to cater to the demands of a mogul: a hard-to-fathom, megarich young woman who is obsessed with reopening the coldest of cases—the decades-old death of the mother she never knew. Serpentine was not originally intended for publication but was instead written in 2004 at the special request of Nicholas Hytner (then the artistic director at the Royal National Theatre) to be auctioned for charity during the company's production of His Dark Materials; the work sold for a "substantial sum". [1] At the time of writing Pullman had not intended to revisit Lyra as an adult but after the publication of The Secret Commonwealth decided to issue the novella as it prefigures Lyra and Pantalaimon's character development in The Book of Dust. [1] Synopsis [ edit ] Several times while reading “Serpentine”, my jaw hit the floor. Other times, I had to put the book down in disgust. But still, I soldiered on because I was reading a brilliantly written account of one of the most sociopathic, self-serving and evil conmen and murderer that’s ever walked this earth. To me, out of the multitude of sad and tragic events and victims' stories caused by this beast, this was one of the saddest for me: "Thompson's family believed that the liver disease (hepatitis) that caused his death was contracted in the Far East while investigating the Charles Sobhraj saga." 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. Don’t tell them this guy existed because, while an outlier and extremely rare, his actions from 40+ years ago still make for an effective boogey man today. Basically, someone who a screenwriter or murder mystery novelists couldn’t even conceive of in their own minds.