num_pages: 683
description: “Noelle thought she would have noticed him even if he hadn’t driven his Packard through the front bar of the Hotel Constellation …” Laos 1960. A sleepy post-colonial backwater, run by generals and at war with the communist Pathet Lao in the north. Corsican gangsters, left behind after the French departure five years before, run the opium trade, flying raw opium out of the mountains to Bangkok and Saigon.  The most celebrated of the milieu is Rocco Bonaventure, cursed with a daughter who turns heads everywhere she goes. Baptiste Crocé is kind of man her father has always warned her about - a handsome and womanising pilot with his eye on the main chance.  But Noelle is a woman to be reckoned with, as both Rocco and Baptiste discover for themselves. Their affair, conducted against the looming mountains of Indochina and its blazing poppy fields, change all their lives forever. Baptiste risks his life for her again and again in the air; or is it for control of his father's opium business?  Haunting, passionate, beautifully written, OPIUM is an epic story of love, ambition and destiny spanning four turbulent decades.  COLIN FALCONER is the internationally bestselling author of over two dozen novels of romance and adventure that have been translated into 23 languages.  
title: Opium
titlecomplete: Opium
genres: Fiction, Crime, Historical Fiction, Romance, Adventure
ratings_count: 320
series: Opium
publisher: Coronet Books