Serpentine: A short story from the world of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust

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Another great read of Thompson's is, "Blood and Money (1976)", based on the true story of scandal and the murders of Houston socialite Joan Robinson Hill and her husband John Hill.

Morally bankrupt, unbelievably resourceful in a time when Interpol might as well have been a local council for the good it did and unscrupulous. The author has such an omniscient style of adding sharp jabs of morality intermixed with a hands-off 'this happened - what can be added by stating anything other than the sordid facts' manner of writing. Sobraj was born in April 1944, the illegitimate son of a poor Vietnamese girl and an Indian tailor who lived in Saigon. Written by Thomas Thompson, the author of "Blood and Money", this book is a bit longer than it maybe should have been, and the prose is a bit flowery. At the time of writing Pullman had not intended to revisit Lyra as an adult but after the publication of The Secret Commonwealth decided to issue the novella as it prefigures Lyra and Pantalaimon's character development in The Book of Dust.During this period, bodies have been found slain, their corpses strangled and stabbed and burned and drowned, from the paradise beaches of Thailand, through to slopes of the Himalayas and besides the river Ganges. It was difficult to tell if I was reading about a cohort of the serial killer or one of his victims. In this story, a teenage Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon revisit Trollesund, the Arctic town prominently featured in Northern Lights as the place of her first meeting with the aeronaut Lee Scoresby and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison.

It is unsure exactly how many people Sobhraj murdered and at one time, he was released and allowed to reside comfortably in Paris. I had friends who were traveling the world at these exact times in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in many of the very countries and cities Charles Sobhraj was finding his prey. His only weakness was a penchant for gambling and his ego, both of which may have led him back to Nepal where the criminal cases against him had never been officially closed. This book was written in 1979 and details the murders as committed by Charles Sobhraj throughout Asia. I had an evening of nightmares when I devoured the Thai tales of those most unfortunate people who checked in to Sobhraj's homestay (largely against their will) but rarely checked out.I genuinely count myself as sage when it comes to the rights and wrongs of the world but I felt this total fear absorb me when reading, would I have somehow fallen into the drugging trap (yes) and thereafter, joined an unmerry gang of thieves and accomplices as a means of saving my hide? Let me dial back and say that all are as utterly hideous as can be, but in this boundless world of sickness, I'd put the Yorkshire Ripper, The Green River Killer and Dahmer in the base and vulgar (pleasure seekers who didn't think twice), Ted Bundy and the Hillside Stranglers in the cunning and ambitious (using identities as a luring tactic.