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ASIA HAND
by Christopher G. Moore
Black Cat/Grove, July 2010
266 pages
$14.00
ISBN: 0802170730


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Bangkok is becoming a familiar location for crime fiction readers, thanks to the work of Timothy Hallinan, John Burdett, and Christopher Moore, whose series about Vincent Calvino, a disbarred Brooklyn attorney relocated to Southeast Asia, now has a dozen volumes. Though ASIA HAND, the second in the series, has a copyright date of 2010, it was originally published in Thailand in 1993. Interestingly, the international intrigue involving Muslim fundamentalist movements and US cover-ups does not seem dated.

A friend of Calvino's named Jerry Hutton, a down-at-heels aspiring filmmaker, has been found dead in park pond in Bangkok, a necklace of wooden penises around his neck. The penises are a common amulet used for protection and good luck, "a supernatural phone system allowing dialogue to be carried on between the spirits and humans; only Hutton had found the line engaged when he needed to make the call."

Hutton had been on a roll. He had some footage that was going to make him famous, but unfortunately his fame is posthumous. While Calvino and his Thai friend Pratt try to find out what led to his murder, the film clip, showing the summary execution of rebels in Myanmar, runs on all the news channels. Hutton had been hoping to work on a major motion picture to be filmed in Bangkok. Soon everyone Calvino knows seems to be cast in in "Lucky Charms," including his girlfriend, his ex-wife, and his twelve-year-old daughter. Calvino suspects the filming is a cover-up for something far more sinister. He needs to rewrite the script before his daughter gets hurt.

In addition to a vividly realized setting that provides a colorfully sordid picture of Bangkok, Moore employs traditional PI motifs in this story. Calvino is a down-at-heels renegade, a highly independent man who doesn't hesitate to use his gun. He even has a loyal secretary who can throw off the bad guys, though she seems to have little else in her job description. The greatest attraction of the book is that the mean streets this man goes down are in Bangkok.

This new edition has a frustratingly high number of mistakes – missing words, strange substitutions such as "muscle flash" instead of "muzzle flash," as well as a handful of minor factual goofs, such as Calvino's slipping off the safety catch on his revolver. These glitches are distracting in a story complex enough to require concentration and some suspension of disbelief.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, July 2010

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