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No Sell Dead
James Jennings
Molecular Press: 2018
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The Plotters
Un-Su Kim
Fourth Estate: 2018
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James Jennings’s No Sell Dead is a book of some ambition, but one which is ultimately let down by relying too squarely on the usual tropes of the clueless foreigner who gets caught up in the ongoing fallout from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge era.

The novel opens in 1985 with an unnamed protagonist crossing the United States on a deadly mission. Then the story moves to Yangon, where a Cambodian translator called Dermott Vann is poisoned and dies in front of Lucas Bellwether, a roving international criminal lawyer and hero of the book. Bellwether, who has an estranged Cambodian wife, wafts around the world piecing together the stories of Vann’s life and what drives the cycle of violence around him.

• Tags: Issue 14, James Jennings, Rupert Winchester, Un-Su Kim