Cambodia Noir

January 11, 2016
Journalist Seeley makes his fiction debut with a dark thriller set in Cambodia in 2003. June Saito, an American photographer and journalist based in Phnom Penh, disappears after a major drug bust throws the Cambodian military, police force, and members of the capital’s criminal class into a mad scramble for power. June’s sister, Kara Saito, hires photojournalist Will Keller to look for her. Excerpts from June’s diaries chronicle her descent into sadomasochism as an escape from personal trauma. Will is a tough guy with a drug habit and a guilty secret of his own. He uses his search for June, which leads to an underworld of drugs, violence, and sexual vice, to try to put a check on his own self-destructive behavior and find new meaning for his dissipated life. Readers should be prepared for oblique cultural references and vague aphorisms that needlessly encumber an otherwise compelling story of depravity and redemption with echoes of Twin Peaks and the bleakest works of Jim Thompson. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown.

October 15, 2015

A journalist who's covered the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Seeley sets his first novel in Phnom Penh, where an American woman interning at a local newspaper suddenly fades like smoke into the Cambodian underworld. Will Keller, who's a war photographer with a great career behind him and mostly bar brawls in his future, is persuaded by the beautiful Kara Saito to find her missing sister.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2016
International journalist Seeley's debut novel puts the traditional noir story on 'roids. Whereas dark detective mysteries of the 1930s sent readers down mean streets with a depressed, alcoholic private eye as a guide, this tale is more like an excursion through a makeshift hella maze of bars, clubs, and shanties, with everything for sale and life held cheap. And the guide here? Will Keller is a burnout, a once-great war photographer who careens from drug to drug. It's 2003, and Keller now works for a tiny paper in Phnom Penh, dragging himself out of drug- or alcohol-induced stupors to cover whatever his editor throws his way. Keller has a sideline in finding people, based on his knowledge of Cambodia's dark places. A just-arrived American intern at the paper has disappeared; her sultry, Hammett-worthy sister asks Keller to find her. Some journals the intern left in a suitcase when she crashed at Keller's place are the only clues to her identity, which turns out to be a fluid one. Seeley alternates the girl's diary entries with Keller's point of view, ratcheting up the tension with each discovery. The fast-moving narrative is like riding through Phnom Penh's streets on the back of a motorcycle, as Keller does on his way to assignments. Seeley, himself a journalist in Cambodia in 2003, delivers an up-close, jarring look at a city rocked with unrest and an atmospheric take on that enduring noir protagonist, the dissolute foreign correspondent. A sinuous, shattering thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)