Toxic Spirits - Mani

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Résumé :
Toxic Spirits is a highly atmospheric thriller set in Thailand, a playground for colorful expats, gorgeous women and limitless skullduggery. Narrated with insightful meditations on nature and biodiversity, interspersed with macabre violence and dark hilarity, the novel is also a brilliant, genetics-inspired take on multiculturalism and personal identity. Benton, a widowed African-American intelligence analyst from Washington, retires to Thailand. At an expat bar, he is captivated by Siri, a beautiful tribal singer. When Siri disappears, he discovers that she had been speaking out about the side-effects from drug trials conducted on her hill-tribe. Benton's investigations draw him uncomfortably close to Pierre, the seriously disturbed Indo-Cambodian doctor running the trials. Becoming an unwilling guinea-pig in the trials, Benton is transformed by the genetically-engineered drugs and falls in love with Mimi, a stunning and gifted young Thai-Australian muay thai boxer. As the genetic manipulations spiral out of control, spreading to the botanical treasures of Thailand's Golden Triangle, the forces of tribal healing, high-tech medicine, and love battle to determine who will survive.

Biographie:
Mani is a writer, scientist, and professor who retired early from Silicon Valley to Thailand, where he volunteered in the Golden Triangle with the hill-tribe fictionalized in the novel Toxic Spirits. Born in India and educated across four continents, he studied creative writing at Penn (with Carlos Fuentes), at Bread Loaf (with Patricia Hampl), and at Harvard (with Paul Harding). Prior to working in Silicon Valley, he was based in Washington, DC, and Boston as a professor as well as a scientist at a not-for-profit think-tank advising the US government on advanced AI technology. His affiliations have included Georgetown University (Associate Professor), Yahoo (Senior Director), Cambridge University (Visiting Fellow), MITRE (Senior Principal Scientist), Brandeis University (Visiting Scholar), and MIT (Research Affiliate). Mani's six previous books (two of which have been translated into Japanese) include The Imagined Moment, on the computing of time in narrative, and other titles are from Oxford and MIT Press. His stories and essays have been published in 3:AM Magazine, Aeon, Apple Valley Review, Drunken Boat (Finalist for the Pan Literary Award, also one of Story South's Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007), Eclectica, New World Writing, Nimrod (Finalist for Katherine Anne Porter Prize), PANK, Short Fiction Journal, Slow Trains, Storgy, Unsung Stories, Word Riot, and many other venues. Toxic Spirits is the first volume of a trilogy dealing with the effects of unfettered venality on marginalized Southeast Asian communities. The sequel is devoted to the looting of Asian antiquities and the final volume is set amid the devastation of reckless dam building along the Mekong River.