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...

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...

As foreigners rush into Myanmar with briefcases stuffed with plans and cash for hotels, shopping malls and high rises, they discover the old ways die hard. Vincent Calvino's case is to find a young British-Thai man gone missing in Myanmar, while his best friend and protector Colonel Pratt of the Royal Thai Police has an order to cut off the supply of cold pills from Myanmar used for the methamphetamine trade in Thailand.As one of the most noir novels in the Vincent Calvino series, ...

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 ...

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...

Bullets are flying in Bangkok.When journalist George Snow's BBC broadcast captures the crack of M-16 fire over Sanam Luang, expatriate writer Robert Tuttle is upcountry, listening in horror. As Bangkok erupts in violence, Tuttle races back to a city on fire — where soldiers turn their guns on civilians, and the air hums with ghosts from every side of Thailand's political divide.In A Haunting Smile, Christopher G. Moore paints an unforgettable portrait of a city—and...

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...

"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...

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...

Heart Talk explores the emotional range of the Thai language through the word jai—the heart. In Thailand, the heart is more than a metaphor; it is the center of thought, mood, and connection. This updated digital edition presents over 900 jai-based expressions, organized by situation and nuance, revealing how Thai speakers convey compassion, anger, generosity, and joy. Each entry includes pronunciation and phonetic guides, illustrative examples, and a sig...

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 Krungthe...

A noir investigation set in Bangkok's climate-changed future. It is the era of the Great Upheaval and the Resistance, a time when people split their lives between virtual reality and the real world of sunken streets and khlongs swallowed by rising seas, in a land where resources are stretched and the poor are thirsty.In the final book of the Vincent Calvino crime series, Calvino searches for a missing teenage "water boy," and ends up caught between a Chinese-controlled AI named Hen...