(In 2001, Howard Engel suffered a stroke that left him with a rare condition called alexia without agraphia, which scrambled his memory and left him unable to read but still able to write. He had to learn how to read all over again and come up with methods compensating for not being able to remember a person's name the second after he heard it. Since the stroke, he has written an account of his recovery, The Man Who Forgot How To Read, and this is the second Cooperman novel he's written with his hero having to cope with a similar condition).

But the best laid plans of mice, men, and private investigators never seem to work out the way they're supposed to. When an old school friend shows up in the office one day while Benny is trying to spell his way word by word through old case files, she convinces him to pick up stakes and head off to South East Asia and investigate the disappearance of her husband in the small country of Murinam.

Vicky and her husband Jake had been running a successful diving business for the tourist trade when the government decided they wanted more than just the taxes the couple were paying, and nationalized the company. When the local politico who took the business over ran it into the ground, he hired Jake back to run it and set him up to take the fall for the place's mismanagement. Benny's job is to see if he can find out what happened to Jake, recover any of the family's fortunes, and of course come out the other side alive.

Murinam still holds onto more than a few mementos of its French past, and is also marked by the more recent disaster of the tsunami. Fading and crumbling French colonial architecture mix with wrecks of ships cast up on shore three hundred metres from the beach, and a community of European and North American ex-patriots that seem to have stepped from the pages of a Graham Greene or a Somerset Maugham novel. Acclimatizing is complicated for Benny by his inability to remember the name of his hotel or the names of anyone he meets, even with the use of his memory book (a note book to write down everything he's come to know his memory will fail to retain).


Yet in spite of being slowed down by the quirks of his brain and his bout of the local version of "Tourista" stomach, Benny soon finds himself ankle deep in suspects and intrigue. When dead bodies start showing up, and the police and government start taking a little bit too much of an unhealthy interest in his nosing around, Benny knows he must be getting somewhere. Now if only he could remember what it was he said or who he saw that could have triggered those reactions.