A Burden of Flowers

The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist “Tez” Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends, and – “like Dorothy with the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow” – sets off to challenge a shadowy and, to her, very alien situation.
Her brother, languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the two women – one sweet, one sinister – who changed his life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction…and to the day a police stooge planted a cigarette carton filled with heroin in his room in the Kuta Beach “backpack territory” of Bali.
Tez’s life hangs in the balance, tipped one way by the maneuverings of a dangerous senior police officer, and the other way by the investigative efforts of an undercover agent who, in a powerful climax, is shot and left for dead.