Asia Hand

Book excerpt: Shamus Award Winner: A disbarred American lawyer-turned-PI tracks down a killer: “Think Dashiell Hammett in Bangkok” (San Francisco Chronicle). It’s the Year of the Monkey in Bangkok. But expat Vincent Calvino’s Chinese New Year celebration has been interrupted. Thai cops have fished the body of a farang—foreign—cameraman from Lumpini Park Lake, and CNN is running dramatic footage of several Burmese soldiers on the Thailand border executing students. Calvino follows the trail of the dead man to a feature film crew, where he hits the wall of silence. On the other side of that wall, Calvino and Colonel Pratt discover an elite film unit of old Asia hands with connections to influential people in Southeast Asia. They are about to find themselves matched against a set of farangs conditioned for urban survival and willing to go for a knockout punch. “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).” —Booklist “When Americans discover Christopher G. Moore, they’re going to strip the bookstores bare of his work.”—T. Jefferson Parker