Can a Western author convincingly put himself inside the mind of a Thai cop? Writing in the first person in "Bangkok 8," British author John Burdett "becomes" detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a Thai cop and born-again Buddhist who speaks English with a German accent.
Sonchai grew up on the streets, his mother one of tens of thousands of girls from the impoverished countryside who swarmed into Bangkok during the Vietnam war to entertain American soldiers on short leave from the battlefront. One soldier, in fact, even fathered Sonchai. But his mother proved a sly businesswoman and over the years shacked up with a succession of farang (foreigner) men -- from whom Sonchai picked up his strange but serviceable English.
Sonchai works out of a "Third World police station, which is to say a two-story reinforced concrete structure festooned with our flag and busts of our deeply beloved King."