Welcome to Bangkok.

Bribery,
corruption,
money laundering,
and murder.

They're not out to get you.

It's just how they do business.

Once a high-flying international lawyer and a renowned expert on global money laundering, Jack Shepherd has happily swapped the fierce intrigues of Washington for the lethargic backwaters of Bangkok, where now he's just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in an unimportant city. Or is he?

A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd is a man perpetually tantalized by the moral labyrinth that bedevils all western expatriates in Asia.

An international bank collapses under dubious circumstances; a law partner killed two years ago abruptly reappears; prominent members of the Asian financial community die spectacular deaths; and a twisting trail of deceit and corruption leads Jack Shepherd from Manila to Bangkok to Hong Kong to the fabled island of Phuket, and ultimately all the way back to the life he thought he'd left behind in Washington, perhaps even straight into the White House itself.

An early version of this book, now out of print, was published in 2000 under the title TEA MONEY with distribution only in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. While TEA MONEY and LAUNDRY MAN are related, they are not identical. Although based on the TEA MONEY manuscript, LAUNDRY MAN was written as the basis for an on-going series of Jack Shepherd novels. As such, it contains both characters and situations not appearing in TEA MONEY, and some existing characters have been significantly altered.