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'Things go wrong in a big way for Candy Somerville when her father commits suicide. Feeling herself responsible, she is driven by guilt into a journey to Thailand on an insane mission. When she arrives in Bangkok in 1992 during the uprising against the military junta, a large amount of heroin is found in her baggage, leading to her imprisonment on a capital charge, in the infamous Klong Prem prison.
'Her father's old friend, a consul at the Australian Embassy, offers to get her legal help but she refuses to talk to him. Her brother and their uncle arrive from Sydney expecting to at least win her bail from prison, but she violently rejects their assistance.
'Sensing a story, the beautiful Bangkok correspondent for a Sydney television channel works on the brother for information. Meanwhile, the consul and her uncle manage to bribe a corrupt Army colonel to release Candy from prison. Much to her dismay, she is released.
'And then the colonel discovers he has been compromised by a news report about her release...
'In The Betrayers we read the story as told by six very different participants - Candy's brother, the consul, his mistress, the reporter, the uncle, and finally Candy herself.' (Publisher's blurb)
Notes
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Dedication: The Betrayers is dedicated to my dear friend of some 40 years, Iain Thomson, and his wife, Dawn, who kindly put me up in their flat in Bangkok for two weeks while I gathered information for the book.
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Epigraph: Father, the Maenad Song of Death/ I cry you among the dead/ Beneath the earth, the words I pour/ Day after day, unending as I move/ Ripping my flesh with sharp nails./ Fists pounding my clipped head/ For your dying. - Electra, Euripides.
Affiliation Notes
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This work is affiliated with the AustLit subset Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing because it has an Asian setting.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
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Bangkok,
cThailand,cSoutheast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
