(FORTUNE Magazine) – Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun (Doubleday) is quite literally a novel in search of a screenplay--a Miramax manuscript is at the center of the plot. The setting: Cambodia before the death of Pol Pot. The characters are refugees from a Whit Stillman movie, disaffected children of privilege seeking inner lives: the button-down journalist in tennis shorts, the Harvard babe gone bad (you can tell, her hair is sooo stringy), the idealistic hero who, having seen too much and felt too much, snorts and deals heroin all day.

The killing fields are ripe for this sort of expat noir. But only the astounding beauty of the landscape--or limbs occasionally being blown off by grenades--penetrates the self-absorption of Bingham's characters. Their stories suggest that New York and L.A. and Phnom Penh are all pretty much the same--equally exotic, equally corrupt, a web of viciousness and deceit fueled by major coincidences and the heroin trade.

A lot of wan cynicism wafts through these pages. Everything is relative. Everything has a three-day stubble. It's a casting agent's dream.

--William Nabers