Jean

In 1976, four friends - Dan, Fred, Tim, and Thierry - are on a bus along the hippie trail from London to Kathmandu. But everything is not going according to plan. After a drug deal goes wrong, the boys barely escape with their lives. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs, and a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, and Fred disappears with the drug money. A quarter-century later, mysterious emails invite the other three to pick up their share of the money.

Theo, our scruffy, big-hearted, and quick-witted heroine, is not so much down on her luck as delivered luckless into a culture where the winners and losers have already been decided. Her adventures in getting over take her from San Francisco to New York City, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics.

German Detective Maier travels to Phnom Penh, the Asian kingdom's ramshackle capital, to find the heir to a Hamburg coffee empire. As soon as the private eye and former war reporter arrives in Cambodia, his search for the young coffee magnate leads into the darkest corners of the country's history, and through the history of the communist revolution to the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal, who hides amongst the detritus of modern Cambodia and reigns over an ancient Khmer temple deep in the jungle.