Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
Take a tour of steamy Bangkok’s red light districts, prisons, and police stations with your guide Detective Soncheep, the last honest detective in the city. Mostly, he’ll take you to tourist destinations, like Khao San, Pattaya, and so on. But he’ll also muse a lot about prostitution, tell you all about the drug Yaa-baa (speed), and let you in on a murder in the jade-smuggling/sex-change/S&M industry.

This is a fun noir style novel written by a farang, but with a superficial understanding and discussion of thai culture. It’s seedy, seamy, never really dull, and has enough occasionally well written paragraphs to hover just so slightly above crap, but still firmly in the pulp-o-sphere.

Bangkok City Guide by Lonely Planet
Bangkok, crown of Thailand, tropical jewel of southeast asia is a world unto itself. It sprawls for miles on either side of the peaceful Chao Phayra river and rises up to touch the polluted skies in the form of hundreds of modern glass and steel skyscrapers.

My well traveled friend Dave L. loaned me this handy pocket size city guide to the city before our departure, and it proved a welcome companion to the more robust but diffused knowledge in the general book on Thailand. More than once, I was able to get where we wanted to be by unfolding the front cover map and pointing out our desired destination to the patient, but sometimes English-lacking tuk-tuk drivers.

I will definitely buy a city guide to any mega-city I intend on visiting in addition to the general country guides. The two in tandem provide an excellent introduction to a place.