cover image Kiet Goes West

Kiet Goes West

Gary Alexander. St. Martin's Press, $18.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-312-07851-5

The sixth Supt. Bamsan Kiet tale, after The Deadly Drought , finds the insightful, introspective police chief traveling from Indochina to Oregon. There Kiet's adjutant, Captain Binh, has apprehended, and lost, an American computer programmer who embezzled $20 million from Kiet and Binh's homeland, the Kingdom of Luong, ``a constitutional monarchy and a state of the mind.'' After leading Binh to Los Angeles and Disneyland, computer programmer Davey Peterson escapes. His body is soon found, with a bullet hole in the skull, burned to a crisp in a stolen car on the 13th green of a suburban golf course in Oregon. Binh, who beat up a security guard dressed as Donald Duck when Peterson escaped, becomes the prime suspect. Now Kiet must prove Binh's innocence and retrieve the stolen money while evading the American police. Aided by a cut-rate attorney, an upscale realtor and Davey's mother, Kiet and Binh tangle with Seattle's Luong population, headed by an expatriate chef and a weight-loss/self-image huckster whose course helped Davey believe in himself. As in Alexander's previous books, satire reigns as jargon-spewing Binh and the unassuming Kiet hop from clue to clue and place to place, trying to discern motives for their fellow humans' actions. (June)