With The Glass Kingdom, Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark) delivers a stylish novel of a woman and a city slowly unraveling. American Sarah Mullins awaits her next move after taking residence in a fading Bangkok apartment tower with only the clothes on her back and $200,000 in swindled cash--if she's not outfoxed by the building's residents first.
Quiet and unassuming, Sarah ingratiated herself as a personal assistant to a revered, elderly author before embezzling cash and fleeing the U.S. While the dust settles, Sarah escapes to Thailand and moves into the Kingdom, a complex of glass towers that once represented luxury and opulence, but now stands for faded glamour, where "the small signs of decay that were everywhere reassured her that here she would be removed from the world's radar." To mitigate her boredom, she joins three women--Mali, Ximena and Natalie--for alcohol and marijuana-fueled poker nights, but it's obvious to the women that Sarah is hiding something. And for two of the Kingdom's ever-present inhabitants--Goi and Pop, a maid and a maintenance worker--secrets are exchanged like currency, and Sarah presents an opportunity.
Osborne suffuses The Glass Kingdom with an atmosphere both ominous and languid. Bangkok is increasingly subject to suffocating power outages and civil unrest, and many of the Kingdom's residents, "squandered and guttering lives piled on top of one another in anonymity," are as trapped as Sarah, the American farang (the Thai term for white people) who thought she could slip by unnoticed. --Frank Brasile, librarian