Asia Hand

May 10, 2010
First published in 1993 in Thailand in a small English-language edition, Moore's stylish second Bangkok thriller featuring disbarred American lawyer Vincent Calvino (after Spirit House) finds Calvino and his best friend, Col. Prachai "Pratt" Chongwatana of the Thai police, investigating the death of U.S. ex-pat Jerry Hutton, a freelance cameraman. Hutton drowned in a lake while wearing "a necklace of small wooden penises," amulets worn by upcountry farmers, not foreigners. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? The trail leads to a mysterious American colonel involved with a movie being filmed in Bangkok, Lucky Charms, whose purpose has more to do with spies and murder than entertainment. Calvino and Pratt quote a lot of Shakespeare as the author explores the dark side of both Bangkok and the human heart. Felicitous prose speeds the action along, as in this snapshot of a Thai bar girl: "Her meter had clocked more than a few miles; but she was still roadworthy as she turned the last corner on her thirties").

May 15, 2010
Once more Vincent Calvino, Bangkok's most newsworthy private eye, forgoes paying clients to avenge a dead acquaintance and incidentally protect himself and his family.

After some bumpy times, freelance cameraman Jerry Hutton finally seemed to have it made. With soundman Roland May, he'd recorded footage of a Burmese Army division flagrantly violating the Geneva Convention. When the resulting publicity allowed him to option the story of his life and won him a job doing second-unit work on American director Jesse Tyler's movie Lucky Charms, he'd been so ebullient that he'd splurged to buy his rental wife Kwang a German Shepherd to breed. That was all before he was thrown into jail and, soon after his release, thrown into Lumpini Park Lake and drowned. Did the 22nd Burmese Division somehow get back at him? The murder of Roland, which follows apace, makes it sound that way. But his friend Col. Pratt of the Bangkok police helps Calvino, who's less interested in the subject of Hutton's movie than in the process of filmmaking, see something odd about the footage that put Hutton on the hot seat. And Calvino sees something even strangerf about Lucky Charms, starting with its cast. For the film's leading lady Carol Hatcher, the daughter of a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, is joined by Calvino's lover Kiko and his visiting daughter Melody, 13, who lands an unsought role hours after her plane touches down.

Less original and densely packed than Calvino's earlier cases (Paying Back Jack, 2009, etc.), but just as dankly atmospheric.

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May 1, 2010
The authors latest Bangkok thriller finds private investigator Vincent Calvino looking into the death of someone he knows, a man whose body was pulled from a lake. The dead man was a freelance news cameraman, and it appears that something he caught on film led to his murder. But whos the killer, and can Calvino find him before his own life is cut short? The author, whos lived in Bangkok for more than two decades, fills the novel with authentic settings; on the other hand, his novels arent travelogues, and he never loses sight of his characters and their story. Fans of this long-running series (this is the eleventh installment) will completely enjoy this novel, and it should also be highly recommended to readers of hard-boiled detective fiction, including series set in Bangkok (especially John Burdett's Sonchai Jitplecheep novels) as well as the classic American tough-guy authors (Raymond Chandler or, more recently, Robert B. Parker).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)