Serpentine: A short story from the world of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust

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Journeying back and forth over half the globe - from the boulevards of Paris to the slopes of Mount Everest to the underbellies of Bangkok and Hong Kong - Sobhraj left in his wake a trail of baffling mystery and inexplicable horror. Shobraj used a variety of aliases, usually from stolen passports, posing as a gem dealer to first extract money, but which (for reasons unknown) quickly escalated into murder.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a free advanced reader’s copy in exchange for my honest review. The Afghanistan escape was so gnarly, he used a big horse syringe and took out a ton of his own blood then drank it from a glass, then pretended he was dying of some kind of internal hemorrhaging, then escapes from the hospital. Some of those successes—the toughest ones—have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware. He had this aura of wealth, spoke four or five different languages, and he flashed gold watches and jewelry. First published in 1979, Serpentine continues to offer a reading experience as frightening as it is unforgettable.Like his wife, Leclerq, or "Monique" as she was known, provided Sobraji with a veneer of respectability, and like many of his minions, she was loyal and desperately in love with him. Thompson does a great job of painting the full picture of the man from the beginning of his life until he was caught and imprisoned. He took advantage of these traits to gain the trust of western tourists, often times couples on holidays that saved their whole lives for a trip to Asia, traveling throughout India, Pakistan, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam’s, Hong Kong, Turkey before heading back home.

While fog may have lain heavy in the communities around and over the water on Lake Washington, that body of water is insufficient to create a weather event in Queen Anne.

Let me dial back and say that all are as utterly hideous as can be, but in this boundless world of sickness, I'd put the Yorkshire Ripper, The Green River Killer and Dahmer in the base and vulgar (pleasure seekers who didn't think twice), Ted Bundy and the Hillside Stranglers in the cunning and ambitious (using identities as a luring tactic. To those of you not terribly interested in reading after getting an overview, I can’t say I blame you.

I had friends who were traveling the world at these exact times in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in many of the very countries and cities Charles Sobhraj was finding his prey. Charles angry that Chantal was able to escape him, swore that he will find her and bring his daughter back to him. His book Hearts (1971) concerned the rivalry between Houston surgeons Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley at the dawn of the heart transplant era. Jonathan Kellerman features his most prominent writing traits in Serpentine including his excellent ability to paint a picture of a crime scene and lure the reader into a sense of false security as the crime develops into a race against time. Morally bankrupt, unbelievably resourceful in a time when Interpol might as well have been a local council for the good it did and unscrupulous.

Though he claimed to have married a Nepalese woman and tried many times to have his sentence repealed, he remained in prison and is still incarcerated there today.