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Cambodia, 1992: the most expensive and ambitious operation ever mounted by the United Nations is underway. Lorenzo Hardwicke Bowman (‘Hard to his friends and to his enemies’) arrives in Phnom Penh to play his part in restoring law and order to a country shattered by the Khmer Rouge genocide. Failed artist, reluctant lawyer and burn-out soldier, Bowman has been transferred from his UN job in Vienna by his boss – who also happens to be his wife.
Bowman’s flamboyant character immediately upsets the powers-that-be and he discovers that the comfortable job he expected in Phnom Penh has been lost to an Italian skilled in cappuccino politics. Instead the expendable Bowman is sent to investigate the brutal killing of a political worker in Kompong Treng, a ramshackle ex-colonial outpost perched on the banks of the Mekong River in a remote province infested with disease, corruption and Khmer Rouge.
As the monsoon sets in and the casualties mount, Bowman is haunted by his previous visits to Cambodia during the Vietnam war, especially a gruesome ambush in which he mistakenly killed women and children. Unable to leave the war behind, his refuge on regular visits to Phnom Penh becomes the enigmatic Café No Problem, a bar festooned with photographs of foreign journalists who went missing during the fighting in Cambodia in 1970.
But even at the Café No Problem Bowman is confronted by an elusive figure from the past who fleetingly appears in faded combat fatigues to take photographs of Bowman and his companions, two of whom are soon dead.
By the time Bowman is forced to leave Cambodia he is ill, disillusioned and paranoid. In his determination to find the killers he has made powerful enemies, lost friends and recruited unlikely allies, including the mistress of his most implacable enemy. Not only has he been forced to confront the past, but he has been drawn into an uneasy alliance with a murderer. And, in the absence of official justice, he has connived in the death of at least one more man after he flies out of Phnom Penh.
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