Serpentine: A short story from the world of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust

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The book was written in 1979 while Charles Sobhraj is still serving his sentence in Tihar, “the” Indian jail. But in the end Sobraj outdid himself and remains in prison, a victim finally of his own hubris and voracious appetite for publicity and gain.

He feels the pain of the families and friends left to wonder how their children met such cruel deaths.

Even though she saw how he was and what he was doing, she had no willpower or the guts to leave him because she loved him.

In masterly fashion Thompson examines the lives not only of the intelligent, charismatic, conscienceless and thoroughly dangerous Sobhraj but also of the unsuspecting victims that he drugged, robbed, sometimes tortured and without a qualm killed.Sobhraj was born to a Vietnamese mother and Indian father, which in some ways left him as a person without a country and eventually allowed him to move more freely during his crimes.