Catagory: Crime, Thriller & Mystery

A mysterious new variant of Covid-19, dubbed the Singapore Strain
is infecting people around the world. It changes the victims’ DNA
and manifests itself by altering perceptions and attitudes
to make them environmental activists and turns them
into Dynaborgs. A motley team of investigators
from America, Australia, Botswana, Britain,
Estonia, India, Singapore & Sweden are
trying to unravel its secrets even as
they turn Dynaborgs themselves.
Is it as benign as it seems?
What are its origins?
Does it have the
potential to
wipe us
out?
!

Real estate agent Eric Foo is tricked into spending a night in a haunted house he’s trying to sell. He discovers an eerie ability—he can sense ghosts. Finding himself drawn into a murder mystery and a web of supernatural intrigue, Eric races against time to uncover the truth behind a series of untimely deaths. As he navigates through the intersection where the worlds of the living and the dead meet, the line between reality and the supernatural blurs. Will Eric solve the mystery, or become the next victim in the sinister narrative of the haunted house?

Meet the notorious Ativan Gang, a group of scammers in Manila who befriends solo tourists, then drugs and robs them. Twenty-five-year-old Carmen Maranan is their newest member, a college dropout desperate to see her mother, Nicole, now living with her new family in Vietnam’s old capital, Hue City. When Carmen flees Manila for Hue, she meets Hai, a receptionist, tout, and part-time pimp. Ambitious and driven, Hai’s goal is to be rich and run his own hotel, a dream that feels closer when he crosses paths with Marina, a wealthy Singaporean yearning for a new life—and love.

Told from the points of view of Carmen, Hai and Marina, Hue City brings you deep into the soul of Southeast Asia—from the faded, enigmatic streets of Vietnam’s former capital, to the fraught, gritty drags of Manila and the gleaming, cosmopolitan environs of Singapore—as it tells their intertwined journey towards the treacherous and sometimes heart-breaking path of starting over.

A novel of ordinary decent criminals and extraordinarily brutal cops weaving together and colliding inside the giant slum of ‘Dreamland’, within the megalopolis of Metro Manila, Philippines.

Dreamland’s entrance may smell of soap from the nearby detergent factory, but within the sprawling maze of thousands squeezed into tenements and shanties, there’s only the reek of corruption, crime, and cockroaches—the insect and human kind.

Dodong’s cushy life as a low-level criminal takes a violent turn when his girlfriend Che, a beautiful bar girl, turns up dead. The police officers have tagged Dodong as the primary suspect and he decides to scrub any evidence he and Che were ever lovers to survive.

With the help of his best friend Buldan, Dodong endeavors to investigate who framed him. As they try to elude the villainous police officer Elmer, a manhunt for the serial killer of gay men proceeds with startling incompetence.

This manhunt is also connected, among other things, to part-time mortician Butsok’s increasing purchases of oil and why his sister’s a cripple.

These seemingly disparate stories will unlock the mystery of Che’s death and Dodong’s suffering. As the cordon tightens around them, Dodong and Buldan move towards a furious denouement, encountering unlikely allies and enemies, stumbling on foul truths in their world drenched in perpetual violence and poverty.

When all paths unforgiving are found, the friends will wish they’d never uncovered the power above that rules all and spares none.

Sydney, 1966. Flower power is in full swing. The Cold War is at its height.
Somewhere in Kings Cross, Singapore’s former Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock is missing. Now the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia, he had left his home in Canberra without a word of where he had gone.
Is he dead? During his reign as Chief Minister, he had cracked down hard on the Communists, and they will want to settle scores with him.
Is he in hiding from mounting debts? Lim is known for his punts on the horses on weekends.
Or is he mixed up in Cold War espionage? One of his ministers, Chew Swee Kee, was alleged to have received money from the CIA – and there’re rumours Lim had his share of it.
And how is a 19-year-old stripper, Sandra Nelson, Russian by birth, involved in this shady business? Is she Lim’s honey trap?
Private detective Dave Chen has to unravel these tangled knots of political intrigue and personal trauma – and confront his own demons.
Written in poetic form by Felix Cheong and wonderfully illustrated by Arif Rafhan, The Showgirl and the Minister is inspired by the real-life disappearance of Lim over ten days in 1966.

Burrowing deep inside the tension-filled relationship between contemporary Vietnam’s hyper-capitalist society and its communist government, Ta Duy Anh’s The Termite Queen tells the Kafkaesque story of a young man who must expose the corruption of a vast network of murky figures profiting from their connections to power. Banned in Vietnam, this allegorical story is told by Viet, a native-born Vietnamese who takes over his deceased father’s powerful land development corporation. The funeral hasn’t even concluded before Viet suspects foul play, as one clue after another leads him to question everything he thought he knew about his father, their family business, and its incredible ability to get approval for projects with dubious societal and environmental returns. With the Termite Queen, Ta Duy Anh cements his reputation as one of contemporary Vietnam’s greatest fabulists, having filled this tale with criticisms that can only come from a deep and abiding love for his country.

“We are going to help him die Cassie,” Shantavi told me that afternoon, over steaming cups of soy milk latte, as casually as if announcing a gardening project.

Cassie was an international student at Harvard, the most prestigious university in the world. She was shy and observant, yet underneath her quiet disposition was a desire to experience the world to the fullest, beyond her traditional boundaries and limitations.

One fateful night at the university campus, a free-spirited, daredevil student from the extension school named Shantavi came into her life and they became fast friends over the next four years.

In the spring semester of Cassie’s senior year, Shantavi disclosed to her that she was looking for a partner-in-crime to consort with a wealthy elderly benefactor who planned to kill himself in a year’s time. In exchange for companionship and assistance in the suicide process, they would inherit all his assets and properties after his death.

Thus began the premise for a thrillingly seductive spiral down a rabbit hole over the spring break in Florida, where Cassie inevitably had to cross a point of no return.

Phoebe Wong would do anything to escape a British winter. But it may cost her more than her airfare.
Sunsets, tacos and margaritas all sound perfect to exhausted forty-three-year-old single mum Phoebe with a dead-end job in Southwark. When her long distance boyfriend in New York invites her to meet him in Florida, she couldn’t wait to jump on a plane with her toddler. Arriving with her teething child at her boyfriend’s Key West ‘vacay home’ before him, she is robbed on her first night. With no money, cards or passports, she is grateful for the support of friendly locals. At a BBQ, she meets an old expat British businessman. Her boyfriend arrives eventually, apologetic, and takes her out to a posh seafood dinner. But when the British expat is shot that night in the same restaurant’s car park, Phoebe is trapped in a put-up job, and her boyfriend’s delayed arrival is suspiciously timed. If this place has turned darker and chillier than London, she wants out.
Will she be able to pull herself and her daughter away from danger?

Violet has organised her life in Singapore with a zeal that keeps her family close by her side, and any intimacy safely at bay. While she chases the attention of a German doctor, her daughter and her friends spend their days lost in a hollow world of make believe, memories, and old Agatha Christie novels.
But a death shatters Violet’s grip on the world around her. Was this murder, accident, or suicide? With the authorities drawing closer the family have just hours to try and piece together what really happened. Is this a puzzle, a tragedy, or a crime? Is Violet’s role to bring the truth to light, or bury it alongside the rest of Changi camp’s grizzly history?
Over the next 48 hours, Violet will find out once and for all whether her efforts to control her family’s lives have protected them, or simply left them at the mercy of someone else’s stories.
Changi is a story of obsession, revenge and jealousy that mixes stark emotional power with elements of a classic whodunit.

The Das sisters investigate a counterfeit computer chip syndicate operating out of Asia, to whom murder is a means of protecting business interests. A private plane crashes. A heart pacemaker malfunctions. Only one man in Singapore realizes counterfeit computer chips sold on the black market may be to blame.
He sets on a mission to expose the crime syndicate. When he is murdered, the Das sisters must hunt down his killers.
The third of the Das Sisters Mystery Series finds ASP Dolly Das and her sister, Lily, confronted by two murder cases at once.
The sisters’ holiday in Bali is cut short by the murder of a Singaporean guest at their hotel. A simple case of a robbery gone wrong takes on sinister overtones when they realize the guest may have been the target of a hit by an organised crime syndicate dealing in counterfeit computer chips. Back in Singapore, a member of the murdered man’s family is found strangled. Are the two murders connected? As suspects mysteriously disappear or are killed, and the possibility of police corruption rears its ugly head, the Das sisters are challenged as never before. The sisters, with the help of their mother, Uma, Dolly’s husband, Joey, assistants, Angie and Vernon and the domestic helper, Girlie take risks to bring down the syndicate and find the killers. Jealousy festers when one sister upstages the other. Is this the end of the road for the Das sisters working as a team?