Jake Needham has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is Laundry Man.
Laundry Man
Summary
"If there's a living writer whose work makes me think of the great Raymond Chandler, it's Jake Needham.” (James David Audlin, author of The Train) "Jake Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice." (The Bangkok Post) Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he? A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances and a former law partner Shepherd thought was dead reveals himself as the force behind the disgraced bank. Coerced into helping his old partner track the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared in the collapse, Shepherd follows a twisting trail of deceit from Manila to Hong Kong to Bangkok and eventually to an isolated villa on the fabled island of Phuket where he confronts the evil at the heart of a monstrous game of international treachery. A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today’s allies are tomorrow’s fugitives, Jack Shepherd battles a global tide of corruption, extortion, and murder that threatens to destroy the new life he has made for himself in Thailand.
©2000, 2011 Jake Raymond Needham (P)2014 Jake Raymond Needham
Killing Plato
Summary
"The gritty and taut Killing Plato is 100 percent unadulterated attitude.” (The Singapore Straits Times) “Jake Needham is a classic master of crime, intrigue, and edgy thrillers.” (James Grady, New York Times best-selling author of Six Days of The Condor) Jack Shepherd was a politically connected American lawyer until he traded the fierce intrigues of Washington for the quiet life of a college professor in Thailand. Everything had been going pretty well for him there, too, at least it had until the day he walked into a bar on the jet-set island of Phuket and found the world’s most famous fugitive waiting for him. Plato Karsarkis was an international celebrity straight out of Vanity Fair until a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Iraqi oil and charged him with racketeering and money laundering. There’s also the matter of a woman he may or may not have murdered to cover it all up. When Karsarkis fled the United States and disappeared, the world’s media whipped itself into a frenzy searching for him. Karsarkis is waiting for Shepherd in that Phuket bar because he wants to hire him. He figures a presidential pardon would be his ticket back to America, and he thinks Shepherd’s connections to the White House just might get it for him. But the U.S. Marshals are in Phuket, too, and they need Shepherd’s help as well. The marshals want Shepherd to set a trap for Karsarkis so they can grab him and drag him back to New York. All Shepherd wants is for everybody to go away and leave him alone. At least he does until he learns a chilling secret that plunges him a violent spiral of friendship and betrayal and pulls him straight back into the life he thought he had left behind in Washington. The marshals aren’t really in Phuket to arrest Plato Karsarkis. They’re there to kill him.
©2006, 2011 Jake Raymond Needham (P)2014 Jake Raymond Needham
The Ambassador's Wife
Summary
“Jake Needham is Asia’s Dashiell Hammett. His plotting is top-notch, and his writing is exquisitely fine. Highly, highly recommended.” (Brendan DuBois, New York Times best-selling author with James Patterson of The First Lady) "The Ambassador’s Wife is another terrific book from a terrific writer. In the genre of crime fiction set in Asia, Jake Needham is in a class of his own.” (The Bangkok Post) The first body is in Singapore, on a bed in an empty suite at the Marriott Hotel. The second is in Bangkok, in a seedy apartment near the American embassy. Both American women, both viciously beaten and shot in the head. Both stripped naked and lewdly displayed. The FBI says it’s terrorism, but the whispers on the street tell a different story. They say a serial killer is stalking American women in Asia. Singapore CID assigns the case to Inspector Samuel Tay. Tay is something of a reluctant policeman. He’s a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much. Thinking back, he can’t even remember why he became a police detective in the first place. But maybe none of that really matters, because he’s very, very good at what he does. So why is it, Tay soon begins to wonder, that nobody seems to want him to find the women's killer? Not the American ambassador, not the FBI, not even his bosses at CID. When international politics takes over a murder case, the truth is the next victim.
©2006, 2011 Jake Raymond Needham (P)2014 Jake Raymond Needham
The Umbrella Man
Summary
"Jake Needham is Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.” (The Singapore Straits Times) “Needham writes so you can smell the spicy street food mingling with the traffic jams, the sweat, and the garbage.” (Libris Reviews) The first bomb cracked the Hilton like an egg. The second gutted the lobby of the Marriott. And the third peeled the front off of the Grand Hyatt. Three massive explosions, all at American hotels in the heart of the city, and all within a few horrifying seconds. Hundreds are dead and thousands are injured. Singapore is bleeding. Inspector Samuel Tay is a senior inspector in the Special Investigation Section of Singapore CID, but he is frozen out of the investigation from the beginning. He has some serious enemies in Singapore’s Internal Security Department and he has even more enemies at the American embassy, so Tay is assigned routine cases while his colleagues join with the CIA and the FBI in a feverish search for the bombers. Three days after the explosions, the smell of death still sticky in the city’s air, Tay is sent to a run-down apartment near the Malaysian border where two children have found the body of a Caucasian male with a broken neck. Tay feels an immediate connection with the dead man, although he doesn’t think he has seen him before. As Tay searches the dead man’s past for clues to who he was and who his killer might have been, Tay’s own past begins to give up its secrets. A long-dead father he can barely remember reaches out of the grave to point to the truth about both the murdered man and the bombings. And the horror of Singapore’s destruction becomes a personal horror for Samuel Tay.
©2013 Jake Raymond Needham (P)2014 Jake Raymond Needham