Asia Hand

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").
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The author’s 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 who’s the killer, and can Calvino find him before his own life is cut short? The author, who’s lived in Bangkok for more than two decades, fills the novel with authentic settings; on the other hand, his novels aren’t 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 Burdetts Sonchai Jitplecheep novels) as well as the classic American tough-guy authors (Raymond Chandler or, more recently, Robert B. Parker). --David Pitt