Buddhist fiction

I don't know what Buddhist fiction is, but fiction that dwells in Buddhism somehow or some way.

The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett was on a list of great Buddhist fiction, so I'm reading it. It starts in Thailand and then goes to Nepal. The layers of culture, from The Godfather, Poe, to Thai Buddhism to Tibetan Buddhism, to police procedural and murder.

There are fun places to look up: Boudhanath and Swayambhunath.

Links

New Yorker review from 2010: "Burdett’s fever-dream mysteries, set in Bangkok, recast the police procedural as psychedelic peep show. Here, as in previous installments, his hero—a half-Thai, half-farang cop and Buddhist monk manqué—investigates an outlandish crime and frets over his karma. Enlightenment, and freedom from being reborn into “this catastrophe called life,” beckons when he’s sent to Nepal to broker a drug deal and meets a shadowy Tibetan mystic who’s plotting an invasion of China. A mood of manic farce buoys this convoluted tale, which includes a deft social analysis of a Thai women’s prison, Tantric sex, and hot chocolate laced with high-tech pharmaceuticals. It’s all wildly implausible, but written with such louche authority that, by the end, one cheers the seemingly infinite multiplicity of Burdett’s universe."