From Publishers Weekly
Podrug's less than gripping fifth posthumous collaboration with bestseller Robbins (after
The Devil to Pay) uses the recent tragic history of Cambodia as the backdrop for a torrid story of sex and antiquities theft. After falling into professional disgrace, New York City art expert Madison Dupre struggles to get by with a freelance business. Then one day a Thai restaurant deliveryman shows up at her door with a sandstone bas-relief that appears to be Khmer art from the Angkor Wat temple. Before Dupre can thoroughly evaluate the artwork, the man disappears, and her pursuit of him ends with her in police custody. The NYPD, which suspects her of trafficking in smuggled art, gives her the option to go undercover for them in Cambodia, an assignment that leads to dead bodies and sex encounters described in some detail. The horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime make an uncomfortable match for the narcissistic Dupre's escapades.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Product Description
The knock on the door of struggling art expert Madison Dupre’s low rent New York apartment is that of a Thai café deliveryman—but instead of succulent noodles, he has a rare work of art from the incredible antiquity site of Angkor Wat in the jungles of Cambodia. Angkor Wat, a wonder of the ancient world, is considered by many antiquity experts to be even more majestic than the monuments of the Egyptian pharaohs. Left unprotected, the vast complex has been a treasure trove for thieves who mercilessly cut off pieces, mutilating thousand year-old sculptures with chainsaws. Madison knows there is no possibility that this artifact could have been acquired legally. That knock on her door sends her to one of the most dangerous places on the planet: Phnom Penh, the sex-sin-drug capital of the Far East, a place where sex with an underage girl costs less than a pack of cigarettes—and the price of a life is even cheaper. Stepping into a cauldron of murder and antiquity looting that takes her from New York to Cambodia, Hong Kong to Thailand, Madison keeps one step ahead of temple robbers who kill as easily as they steal. She finds comfort in the arms of a soldier of fortune who "hunts" landmines; tangles with a Russian model and her stud "bodyguard," who introduce her to the New Eroticism; and gets entangled with a Cambodian prince with sex moves that not even the worldly Madison had tried. Madison, broke and struggling to recover from her fall from grace with the art trade, is willing to sacrifice everything in order to protect priceless, irreplaceable antiquities that have come down to us over the ages.
