The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Read Free

days at the Chiang Mai Mail, I am only too aware that distracting side-shows can be really annoying for a reader who just wants to get down to the murder. So, here’s the lead-in.
    To compensate for the fact we weren’t making any money at all at the resort, I was working two outside jobs. By far the best-paying was my role as an English language doctor. During her brief visit to Maprao, Sissi had introduced me to the dongle, which turned my notebook into a loaded weapon. Suddenly I could be online without queuing for hours at the Pak Nam Internet café. I couldn’t afford to pay the cell-phone bills, but Sissi had done something illegal to the dtac databank that automatically topped me up. I’d spent a lot of my time on the road during my working days up north and was constantly frustrated by the fact that the sign makers assumed they could translate Thai into English merely with the use of a dictionary. This led to sentences such as DO NOT USE ELEVATOR WHILE CAUSING FIRE. So I had the brilliant idea of offering my services to anyone who wanted their signs translated accurately. Sissi blitzed me all over the Internet, and before I knew it, I was getting regular work. Local councils had me writing their signs to avoid embarrassments, such as my favorite detour sign: EVERYONE GETS OFF HERE. Hotels had me improve on warnings like DO NOT DRIVE IN THE POOL AS WATER NOT SO DEEP. Ironically, my English doctoring practice was keeping us all alive. The Chumphon Department of Highways had sent me a list of road signs to correct. I was a whiz at transcription. It was me who convinced the provincial authorities to rewrite their Chum Porn signs. I had struck gold.
    My other “job” was at the Chumphon News . With the advent of desktop publishing and a wealth of smart unemployed journalism graduates, it was as if almost any town with a population over fifteen boasted its own newspaper. The News operated out of a house beside a busy main road. Its two regular contributors had flu, so, one day the editor asked me if I might interview a famous international writer for them. As famous writers were notoriously thin on the ground in Chumphon, I accepted with bells on. I had visions of Dan Brown on a rock-climbing vacation in Krabi, me flown business class to Bangkok for dinner with Stephen King, a weekend on Kathy Reichs’s yacht off Samui. But I did not have visions of Kor Kao, a ten-minute bicycle ride down the bay from our resort. I was suspicious.
    “What’s his name?” I asked.
    “Conrad Coralbank,” he said.
    It sounded like a coastal preservation program. I could have feigned knowledge to impress the editor, but instead I asked, “And he’s famous?”
    “Absolutely,” he said. He was a very literary man, but he needed to open the Word information sheet he’d put together before he could tell me what the famous author had written.
    “He’s won stuff,” he said. “Awards and that. He writes”—he squinted as he read the English—“mystery novels set in Laos.”
    Laos. Great. My ardor softened to a mushy paste of uninterest. Nobody would ever become famous by writing about a place that 98.3 percent of American high school students couldn’t locate on an atlas. Not even one with the country names written on it and an index. Admittedly, 34 percent of that sample couldn’t find Canada either. Laos—and I don’t want to sound racist here—is easily the most boring place on the planet. I’d been there several times on stories, and it’s a scientific fact that clocks move slower there. One second in Laos is the equivalent of twelve minutes over here. Getting something done was like wading waist-deep through rice porridge. This was clearly going to be one of those pump-him-up-and-make-him-look-more-interesting-than-he-actually-is pieces. Fluff. But it was work. If I did a good job, they might start giving me assignments. Plus, there was the bonus that I’d get to speak English. My latent second language only ever