Dean Barrett: 11 books

T’ao Yuan Ming, a 4th century Chinese poet, wrote of a mysterious utopia in the remote mountains of China. In this utopia, generations of Chinese had isolated themselves from China’s wars and rebellions and knew nothing of the outside world. Sixteen centuries later, after sifting through clues...

A New York publisher who once served in Thailand during the Vietnam War receives a plea for help from his late brother’s Thai widow. When he returns to Thailand after 20 years he finds that the nostalgic portrait he carried of Thailand Past bears little resemblance to reality, and he begins to uncover...

Hong Kong and southern China in 1857. An exotic world of crinolines and top hats; opium dens and clipper ships; betrayal and sudden death. Rich in detail, Hangman's Point brings to life a shocking murder, a sensational trial, a mass poisoning, a cruel slave trade and the desperate schemes of...

Running low on funds, ex-CIA agent Scott Sterling moves into an apartment over a Bangkok bar. He teaches scuba diving and does occasional investigative work usually involving missing bargirls or wayward spouses.But he is soon involved in tracking a murderer through Bangkok’s little known world of...

Scott Sterling, 45, is an American detective, ex-CIA Beijing and Bangkok, and now lives over one of the bars in Bangkok frequented by American vets of various wars.An American woman shows up at the bar; a woman who believes her father, a special forces team leader on highly classified missions...

DECLASSIFIED! Yes, Americans did fight another secret war in Asia! Now, at last, the long-suppressed details of that controversial war can be told. The setting is Bangkok, Thailand. The time is the mid-sixties. And the events are incredible. Join Whore House Charlie, Sgt. Jigaboo, Bumbles, Blinky,...

The Boat Girl and the Magic Fish is a tender introduction to one of the lifestyles that has long identified Hong Kong as a place unique in the world. Kum-choi, a boat girl who has grown up on a Chinese junk at sea, must join in the progress and go ashore to school. There she experiences the shock...

His name is Liu Chiang-hsin: "a mind as sharp as a sword." But "Chinaman" is the name his friends and contacts use. Chinaman grew up in Beijing during the Mao era and was traumatized by seeing Red Guards beat his scholar-father and drag him off; never to return. Three decades later, the one woman...

The three short novels in this volume are related not simply by their milieu of Chinese culture but also by how the supernatural world – or our fears of it – can dramatically shape events in our daily lives.In Bones of the Chinamen the hellish world of the Chinese slave trade is recreated;...

The novel of 84,000 words entitled Identity Theft is a type of literary fiction perhaps somewhat in the style of B.S. Johnson. Michael Herr wrote Dispatches on the Vietnam War in an attempt to capture the discordant sounds, madcap sights and peculiar rhythms of that conflict. Identity Theft deals...

The recently discovered manuscript of an American soldier kidnapped by Chinese female warriors fighting against the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty. They were known as the ‘Silken Army.’ One man’s account of his sexual slavery which segues into a moving love story. "A Love Story: The China...