The fraudster escapes from Indian jail, only to be purposefully caught again to have his term extended for ten years to wait out the statute of limitations in Thailand, where he would've been extradited and hung for his crimes if he had served his original sentence.

First published in 1979, Serpentine continues to offer a reading experience as frightening as it is unforgettable.Some of those successes–the toughest ones – have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware.

In 1968, he was paroled and taken under the wing of his kindly exasperated mentor- from whom he acquired a veneer of sophistication and charm- and managed to ingratiate himself with a young Frenchwoman who he married, impregnated and dragged off to Asia on many misadventures.Thompson barely needs to add further comment, for he has imbued the vast majority of Sobhraj's victims with tenderly told backstories of lives opening to the possibilities of the world. The book was written in 1979 while Charles Sobhraj is still serving his sentence in Tihar, “the” Indian jail. Thompson first wrote Western stories for pulp magazines in 1940 after stints as a sailor, a nightclub entertainer, a secretary and a furniture salesman. The facts describe a likely loser case: a mysterious woman found with a bullet in her head in a torched Cadillac that has overturned on infamously treacherous Mulholland Drive.