But Dan's visit to the jail is inconclusive, and soon he is following the faintest of trails up in the lawless mountain region close to the border with Myanmar, where opium grows abundantly and the dangers of nature are second only to that of man. It's a place where the fearless and the foolish wander -- and disappear forever. To find Charlie, Dan must retrace her steps -- and brave the same traps that swallowed her. Here he will discover his own limits, his own temptations, as he drifts across the strange tides of an even stranger land, on a terrifying mission of self-discovery, blind faith, and salvation.

As uidly ecstatic as a drug, pulsating with a vivid, hothouse atmosphere, "Smoking Poppy takes readers on a hallucinatory -- sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying -- journey across an enthralling, suspense-charged landscape. Graham Joyce, who brilliantly explored the far reaches of human obsession in his acclaimed thriller "Indigo, goes further to prove that such obsession has no boundaries, no taboos, and -- the deeper one gets -- no exit.