Tag Archives: Jayne Keeney

Book review: The Dying Beach

the-dying-beachThere’s two things I love having on this site – special guests and crime fiction set in Asia.

Today’s post has both. 

Crime writer Robert Gott was kind enough to drop by and review my partner Angela Savage’s wonderful new book, The Dying Beach.

Gott is the author of the William Power trilogy of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good MurderA Thing of Blood, and Amongst the Dead. More recently, he also authored the crime novel The Holiday Murders, out now through Scribe Publications.

Angela Savage’s The Dying Beach, the third novel in the series featuring Jayne Keeney, is a beautifully built book. Its parts slide together smoothly, with a satisfying, elegant ‘click’ of finely-tuned logic.

Apart from the working out of the whodunit component of the plot, The Dying Beach offers insights into Thai life and culture that go far beyond information gleaned from a Lonely Planet guidebook.

Savage knows this world well enough to negotiate the thousand subtle landmines a farang, or foreigner, might step on. It is fascinating watching what Savage calls, ‘the fraught dynamics of being a foreigner’, play out. Her private detective, Jayne Keeney, speaks fluent Thai which gives her, and by extension us, privileged access to the lives of the Thai people who inhabit the book.… Read more