Fieldwork

When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist Martiya van der Leun has been found dead--a suicide--in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them. Fieldwork is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.