STREET MUSIC

Hallinan brings the Thailand-based adventures of expatriate travel writer Poke Rafferty (Fools’ River, 2017, etc.) to a close with this ninth installment, which, like so many of the first eight, bears its readers back to a heart-rending past.

Except for not sleeping more than two hours at a stretch, Rafferty’s living his best life as the father of a new baby. The 2-week-old, named both Frank (after Rafferty’s long-estranged father) and Arthit (after his old friend on the Bangkok police), is the subject of conversation everywhere Rafferty goes. Yet the plot seems determined to subordinate the baby and his mother, ex–Patpong dancer Rose, to the other members of his family. Rafferty himself is sucked into the disappearance of Vietnam veteran Bob Campeau, a barfly with whom he’d recently traded words and blows. And the hitherto blank-slate early years of his adopted daughter, Miaow, absorbed by her infatuation with her schoolmate Edward, who’s to play Freddy Eynsford-Hill opposite her Eliza Doolittle in the school production of Pygmalion, turn out to be at the heart of Rafferty’s stalking by Hom, a masseuse-and-more who’s been bullied into the job by a shadowy figure she thinks of as the Sour Man. The connection between Hom and the unsuspecting Rafferty is unfolded in a painfully extended flashback that emerges as the heart of the story and, in some ways, of the series as a whole.

Even fans accustomed to Hallinan’s lurid, compassionate view of Bangkok may have to fight back tears.