For the amount of crime committed in this book, there is a near-complete absence of menace. There is none of the sickening fear or premeditation to hurt and kill that must reside in the mind of a serial killer. Victims are hit on the head, or most often poisoned, and they simply die, as if they were drinking coffee. But despite Dhondy’s failure to create tension as the necessary accompaniment to crime, his fluid prose does surface now and then. He is at his best, as always, when writing about relationships. And when he shuts out all but the Thhat-Virginie relationship, the prose flows and grabs and pins the reader. It is immaterial that Thhat is actually being inconsistent with his inability to really love women, life and probably sex.
The leap from the Sobhraj years to the world of international jehadi terrorism is a good idea to retain the reader’s interest, but again needs different skills akin to that of a Frederick Forsyth or a Len Deighton. They both do a huge amount of scenario and subject research, something Dhondy could have done well with, as he shifts the scene to Paris, London, Cambridge, Belgium and Pakistan with dizzying rapidity and unknown purpose.
The real Dhondy surfaces again in narrating the simple story of Thhat’s daughter, Samarra Sands, only to have her killed by a thug hired by her father. The idea is to reinforce the concept of Thhat the Psycho, after an interlude of Thhat the domesticated man. Did Dhondy really need to write this book? Did HarperCollins advise him that books about serial killers and international terrorism probably needed a different set of skills? We might never know.
