Smoking Poppy : A Novel

Oh that Charlie of mine, how I wanted her back. Dan Innes hasn't seen his daughter for two years. Now he's been delivered shattering news from the British Embassy in Bangkok: the light of his life has been arrested as a drug smuggler, languishing in wait of a probable death sentence in a hellish Chiang Mai jail. Angry and terrified, seething with guilt, reprimands, and questions, he leaves London for Thailand, prepared to fight for his estranged daughter's freedom. But Dan's visit to the jail is inconclusive, and soon he is following the faintest of trails up in the lawless mountain region close to the border with Myanmar, where opium grows abundantly and the dangers of nature are second only to that of man. It's a place where the fearless and the foolish wander -- and disappear forever. To find Charlie, Dan must retrace her steps -- and brave the same traps that swallowed her. Here he will discover his own limits, his own temptations, as he drifts across the strange tides of an even stranger land, on a terrifying mission of self-discovery, blind faith, and salvation. As þuidly ecstatic as a drug, pulsating with a vivid, hothouse atmosphere, Smoking Poppy takes readers on a hallucinatory -- sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying -- journey across an enthralling, suspense-charged landscape. Graham Joyce, who brilliantly explored the far reaches of human obsession in his acclaimed thriller Indigo, goes further to prove that such obsession has no boundaries, no taboos, and -- the deeper one gets -- no exit.

Graham Joyce, a four-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, lives in Leicester, England, with his wife and two children. His books include Indigo, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2000; Dark Sister, Requiem, and The Tooth Fairy, which was chosen as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. Visit the author's Web site at www.grahamjoyce.net.