The murder of a foreigner in Thailand kicks off this crime thriller, the first in the Shamus Award–winning series by "a terrific writer" (T. Jefferson Parker).A farang is dead, and the Bangkok police have a confession the next morning from a young paint-thinner addict. He claims he killed Ben Hoadly, an expat Brit—but American PI Vincent Calvino has his doubts when he sees heavy bruises on the kid's face.In no time Calvino is working both sides, ou...

Mobility runs deep in our evolutionary history. From our beginnings as a species our small bands were on the move. About 10,000 years ago Agriculture hobbled us. Over millennia, we gradually relinquished our traditional mobility by living in permanent rooms. For millennia our world has been constructed from rooms and each generation tells a story of their experience in the never ending, unsuccessful struggle to escape. Rooms is a chronicle that describes the processes that shaped and modif...

Bangkok at night is glossy on the surface and razor-edged underneath. In A Killing Smile, Christopher G. Moore opens the Land of Smiles Trilogy with a noir portrait of obsession, desire, and the cost of belonging in a city that never forgets a debt.When an expat drifter falls for a magnetic young woman whose beauty hides a secret past, he's drawn into a world where favors are traded in whispers, bars turn into hunting grounds, and the past returns like a blade in t...

Bangkok is one of the great cities in the world, but unlike other great metropolises it has no noir tales to its name. Bangkok Noir puts that to right.In this first ever noir anthology of Bangkok, twelve seasoned and internationally known—Thai and Western—writers have come together to make a powerful collection of crime fiction short stories that portray the dark side of this Asian metropolis where the lives of most citizens seem as far away from heaven as its Thai name Krungthep i...

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 studen...

Christopher G. Moore Collected Essays The Cultural Detective For more than twenty years, Christopher G. Moore has been writing about the history, culture and politics of Southeast Asia, in particular Thailand. The Cultural Detective is a behind-the-scene view into Moore’s writing life. In this selection of essays, Moore discusses with the humor and insight that he has become famous for. He draws widely on anthropology, neurology, psychology, ethnography, history and...

An expat detective navigates through seamy, steamy Bangkok in this novel in the international bestselling and Shamus Award–winning series.When PI Vincent Calvino's surveillance of a drug piracy ring ends in definitive video evidence, it looks like the fortunes of the American expatriate and disbarred lawyer are about to turn. But when Calvino's client dies of a heart attack, and he finds the body of a murdered massage girl downstairs, the Thai authorities get suspi...

Christopher G. Moore—creator of the internationally acclaimed Vincent Calvino crime-fiction series—turns his sharp, compassionate eye toward the moral undercurrents of modern Thailand. Fear and Loathing in Bangkok collects Moore's most provocative essays on crime, corruption, superstition, and survival in a city that both seduces and shocks.From "I Am Awesome," the story of a hapless Thai outlaw with five wives and a hole in his leg, to "Speeding Red Bull's Hit 'n Run," "T...

District #3 is a razor-edged, near-future noir about power, climate pressure, and the people caught between systems that no longer protect them.When rules bend and borders blur, a single decision—made in the heat of rising seas and rising fear—sets off a chain of consequences that can't be managed, only survived. In a city wrestling with surveillance, disinformation, and ecological unraveling, truth becomes a black-market commodity and loyalty an endangered resource.Written ...

This story is one of sixteen stories from CHAIRS. The voices are those of Bangkok based freelance journalists and their invited guests. Each Saturday morning, over coffee, the members of Chairs gather to share the latest gossip, scandals, myths, dangers, exploits, and loves that bind together their small community. Sam Kohl is a narrator of the main stories, and Sam reveals, with perfect timing and ingenious twists, the clash of cultures as expats meet Thais, Chinese, Karen, a...

In the lawless days following the fall of the Khmer Rouge, private eye Vincent Calvino crosses from Bangkok into Phnom Penh — a city struggling to rise from genocide and corruption. Hired to track down a missing American, Calvino finds himself in a Cambodia haunted by ghosts of the past and seduced by the promise of fast money and new sins.As he moves between the seedy bars, UNTAC peacekeepers, and ex-mercenaries trading guns for diamonds, Calvino confronts a truth darker than any ...

"A gripping tale of human trafficking, mercenaries, [and] international conspiracies . . . set against the lovely and sordid backstreets of Bangkok." —Barry EislerPaying Back Jack is a gritty crime thriller in the Shamus Award–winning series featuring Vincent Calvino, a disbarred American lawyer working as a PI in the dangerous and steamy Thailand capital.Calvino has agreed to follow the "minor wife" of a Thai politician and report on her movements...