Nick Seeley’s Cambodia Noir. (Generated with AI)

“Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.” Scottish writer Denise Mina was onto something with the observation she made in a 2006 interview with The New York Times .

Indeed, few “non-literary” genres possess the ability as crime fiction to offer readers a glimpse of the history, society, and politics of a place and its people — all at the same time. If one goes for the classics, they would think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in the backdrop of 19th-century London/Britain but more recent examples would be Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels set in and around Edinburgh and Jo Nesbø’s novels centred around troubled Oslo police detective Harry Hole.

Nick Seeley’s Cambodia Noir falls right into this category.

Set in Phnom Penh of the early 2000s, it follows the once-revered, now washed-up American war photographer Will Keller in a city that is yet to recover from the ravages of the Khmer Rouge — the…