Book excerpt: From the highly acclaimed author of Pure Slaughter Value comes this latter-day literary noir about an ex-pat in Cambodia eager to get home but taking all the wrong turns. Asher went to Cambodia to get away from Julie, his Harvard grad ex-girlfriend currently tending bar in a topless joint in New York. But when his UNESCO work cleaning bat dung from Khmer statues is finished, and he decides on a dicey heroin scheme as his means to get home with plenty of money to spare, it's Julie whose help he solicits. She agrees, but plans go dangerously awry frighteningly fast. A pulsating plot and precise literary prose make Lightning on the Sun a startlingly compelling and strangely poetic tale.