Hunters in the Dark - Outdoor Adventure Gear

"One can feel a human heart from a great distance; the hunter feels his prey even in a great darkness."A British drifter wandering Southeast Asia down to his last few dollars manages to win $2000 in a seedy border casino in Cambodia—a fortune to the locals. And people take notice—the wrong people. What should have been a windfall changes Robert Grieve’s life for the worse. And what transpires is a harrowing journey through a country that harbors a schizophrenic personality: one with the gentle, spiritual nature of Buddhism on one side and the gruesome memory of “Year 0” on the other, in which Cambodia’s genocide was unleashed by the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s, and a third of the country perished in its killing fields. Those who did the killing are still alive and well. I visited Cambodia in 2018 and our guide, a younger man who grew up on the streets of Phnom Penh, told us that if you see anyone over 50 in Cambodia, they were the ones who did the indiscriminate killing as teenagers. And there are plenty of them. A sobering thought indeed.Hunters in the Dark is the perfect suspense novel IMO—one that works just fine as an international mystery but also has the depth of a literary novel. The writing is strong, and the author obviously knows his subject as we travel the exotic places that most tourists won’t ever see. But we also are witness to the damaged psyches of those—good and bad—who survived Year 0. It’s a compelling and dark novel with a satisfying twist at the end. I’m looking forward to more books by Lawrence Osborne.