About the Book
From the Big Apple, to the Big Orange, to the Big Mango. It does have a kind of nutty logic to it. Bangkok is about as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world, although at times Eddie wondered if that wasn’t exactly what he had done.
Four hundred million dollars is in the wind, the result of a bungled CIA operation to grab the Bank of Vietnam’s currency reserves when the Americans fled Saigon in 1975. Two decades later, the word on the street is that all that money somehow ended up n Bangkok and a downwardly mobile lawyer from San Francisco names Eddie Dare is the only guy who has a real shot at finding it.
But first Eddie has to survive the jagged netherworld of modern-day Thailand – a corkscrewed realm where big-time drug dealers tango with small-time hustlers, criminals on the 1 am mingle with bureaucrats on the take, and the merely raffish jostle with the downright scary for centre stage in the big leagues of weird. If Eddie can weather all that, maybe he really can find out what happened back in Saigon so long ago, and where those ten tons of money are.
THE BIG MANGO was first published in 1999.
About the Author
Following graduation from Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Jake Needham joined NBC News as a reporter and producer.
In 1989, Jake Needham acquired control of Skylark Films, a producer of television and motion pictures based in Los Angeles and has been producing films and writing screenplays for film and television ever since. Motion pictures either written or produced by him have been distributed by Columbia-TriStar, HBO, Lifetime, the USA Network, Turner Pictures, and Showtime. He is also the author of four international crime novels, all of which became English-language best sellers throughout Asia: THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE, KILLING PLATO, LAUNDRY MAN, and THE BIG MANGO.
Needham lives in Bangkok with his wife, a concert pianist and a popular columnist for The Bangkok Post.
"THE BIG MANGO is a full-blown work. There's no room for improvement. It's as good as it gets." - The Bangkok Post
“No clichés. No BS. Thrillers written with a wry sense of irony in the mean-streets, fast-car, tough-talking tradition of Elmore Leonard.” - The Edge (Singapore)
“Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.”
– The Straits Times (Singapore)
“The most delightful improbabilities are artfully woven together to form the plot of The Big Mango. This witty, inventive, and most of all thrilling thriller is… [a] heady, bloody, luxurious, sordid, fictional romp.”
– The Nation (Thailand)
