Early Days Killer

Chon's Early Days: The Temple Murders

The heat in Hua Hin hides many secrets-but murder isn't one of them.

Chon lives alone in a quiet shophouse near Wat Tham Mongkhon, her days governed by ritual and routine. Her obsessive need for order is both a curse and a compass, the only way to keep her world from spiralling into chaos. When a retired general is found shot dead in the abbot's study, the police arrest the gentle monk without a second thought.

But Chon noticed something they missed: a leather blotter turned seventeen degrees from true, and a curved scuff mark on the polished floor.

With the arrival of her Great-Aunt Margaret-a sharp-eyed widow with a hidden past in MI6-Chon finds herself drawn into a web of blackmail, buried secrets, and desperate lives. The general collected other people's sins like trophies. Now someone has collected his life.

To free an innocent man, Chon must use her gift for seeing what others overlook. The killer thought they'd erased all the evidence. They forgot that disorder always leaves a trace.

Chon's Early Days: The Petchaburi Portraits

Some collectors don't just want things. They want living memories.

When a desperate mother appears at Chon's door clutching a faded school backpack, she brings a nightmare: her eleven-year-old daughter, Nok, vanished on the walk home from school. Witnesses describe a polite foreigner with a camera and a cloth soaked in chemicals. The police have no leads.

Then the mother finds a website. "The Siam Collection" sells vintage Thai treasures-such as toys, clothes, and photographs. And modelling them are three missing girls (that we know of), posed like dolls in an anonymous studio.

As Chon and her formidable Aunt Margaret follow the trail through Petchaburi's hidden corners-a second-hand market, a railway station, a shuttered photo lab-they uncover a collector unlike any other. A man who doesn't just traffic in children, but in nostalgia itself. A man who believes he's preserving innocence by stealing it.

The girls could be alive. Their captor has a contingency plan. And if Chon can't find the pattern in his madness before he executes it, at least three families will lose their daughters forever-this time for good.

Two mysteries. One remarkable mind. The beginning of an unlikely detective's journey.