Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne (Paperback)

Osborne’s brilliance as a travel writer places his web of deceit, greed and need … in a world conjured up with dazzling immediacy … Sumptuous and sinister, languorous and tense, this is a novel that gives Osborne’s remarkable talents haunting scope.

"A modern Graham Greene". (Sunday Times). 

Robert Grieve - pushing thirty and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher - decides to go missing. As he crosses the border from Thailand to Cambodia, he tests the threshold of a new future. And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events involving a bag of 'jinxed' money, a suave American, a corrupt policeman and a rich doctor's daughter, in which Robert's life is changed forever. Alive with malice and grace, this is a taut tale reminiscent of the nightmares of Patricia Highsmith: a story of double identities, and innocence in the midst of evil, from a master of atmosphere and observation.

"An ingenious and atmospheric novel' The Mail, "Sumptuous, sinister, languorous, and tense" Sunday Times

In Hunters in the Dark, Osborne has created a wonderful evocation of Cambodia, that most haunted, seductive country – haunted both by the spirits always believed by its people to have inhabited every part of the land and buy the dreadful crimes committed so recently by the Khmer Rouge, who killed a quarter of the population in three years. … Hunters in the Dark is itself pitilessly good. Those comparisons with Graham Greene aren’t even flattering anymore - Evening Standard

Steeped in the menacing, fatalistic atmosphere of a country with a bloody recent past, this is a terrific novel with an ending that is utterly gripping and satisfying - Mail on Sunday