Waiting for Venus [Paperback]

Singapore University Campus, 1980. Professor Bernard Fox is found hanging from his overhead fan. Everything points to suicide except for one thing: if Bernard hanged himself, how did he turn on the fan?

The autopsy shows the professor had consumed enough tranquilizers to sedate but not to kill. But if he were sedated and murdered, why would his murderer turn on the fan? The turning fan prompts an investigation takes us into the turbulent history of Singapore’s birth as a nation, uncovers a search for World War II treasure and exposes a second-generation thirst for revenge.

A murder mystery wrapped in history and unfolded within a love story.

"Vengeance and Love are merely items on Tom’s anthropology curriculum until the deceptively cosy covers of campus life are drawn back to reveal dormant hostilities fermenting since WWII and ripe for resolution ... and love must wait. Great interplay between realistic characters, episodes of laugh-out-loud humour, well paced and so well written the pages seem to turn themselves.”— Colin Cotterill, author of the Dr Siri series of murder mysteries, includingThe Coroner's Lunch

Robert Cooperis a British subject who has lived overseas most of his life in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Laos. He received a PhD in Economic Anthropology after two years with Hmong villagers in Northern Thailand and Laos. Following publication ofResource Scarcity and the Hmong Response(Singapore University Press, 1984), he was elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Robert left an academic career in anthropology that included lectureships at Singapore, Chulalongkorn, and Chiang Mai universities to join the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He served with the UN in Laos, Geneva, Malawi, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. In 2000, he became Head of the British Trade Office to Laos. He spent a year in Vietnam advising the gls\