Review | The human side of Southeast Asia’s criminal underbelly exposed in non-fiction page-turner Hello, Shadowlands

Hello, Shadowlands
by Patrick Winn
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★★★★★

Non-fiction books about organised crime have a particularly loyal band of readers. With a few exceptions (Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah [2006], Ioan Grillo’s El Narco [2011]), I haven’t enjoyed many of them. But Patrick Winn’s Hello, Shadowlands is so addictive that it has me chasing down everything else he has written.

Subtitled Inside the Meth Fiefdoms, Rebel Hideouts and Bomb-Scarred Party Towns of Southeast Asia, this page-turner is as much an homage to the people of the region, and their adaptability and heroism in the face of extreme odds, as it is an exposé of a criminal underworld worth US$100 billion a year.

If you think you know all about, say, Myanmar’s drug trade, Thailand’s sex industry or Asia’s consumption of dog meat, think again. Winn, an award-winning, American-born, Bangkok-based journalist, overturns many preconceptions and probes much little-known terrain.

For example, how often do you read that, running parallel to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, a second, equally brutal war is being waged by an all-male Catholic priesthood against women seeking to prevent or terminate unwanted pregnancies in that country?