Bookstore and blog for fans of international mysteries and thrillers
Time & Place: early 1990s, Bangkok, Thailand and Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Plot: In the early 1990s, at the end of the devastating civil war, UN peacekeeping forces try to keep the lid on the violence in Cambodia. Gunfire can still be heard nightly in Phnom Penh, where Vietnamese prostitutes try to hook UN peacekeepers from the balcony of the Lido Bar.
Calvino traces a missing farang from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, through the Russian market, hospitals, nightclubs, news briefings, and UNTAC Headquarters. Calvino's buddy, Colonel Pratt, knows something that Calvino does not: the missing man is connected with jewels stolen from the Saudi royal family. Calvino quickly finds out that he is not the only one looking for the missing farang.Last Lines of Zero Hour in Phnom Penh
"'That's what I love about Thailand. The certainty,' said Calvino. 'You never know where you stand and never know when you may fall.''And after you fall, where you may land,' said Pratt."The rice fields were below as the plane descended to Bangkok. They looked out the window at the City of Angels as the late afternoon light turned the Chao Phraya River a burnished gold, then a reflected green, and the canyons of high-rise towers cut through a haze the color of wet cement. Above the horizon a star was shining. Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity."Excerpts from Reviews
Bangkok Post: "Moore writes to entertain, and entertain he does."
The Daily Yomiuri: "The story is fast-paced and entertaining. Even outside of his Bangkok comfort zone, Moore shows he is one of the best chroniclers of the expat diaspora."
CrimiCouch.de: "Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is political, courageous and perhaps [Moore's] most important work. Moore is a brilliant storyteller and a masterful character inventor."
Stuttgarter Zeitung: "A thriller in which the importance of the single crime shrinks visibly at the sight of mass murder and grand corruption." —Thomas Klingenmaier
KulturNews (Hamburg): "It was ten years ago in Cambodia, but this great novel sits well after Kandahar, Luanda, Kabul, Baghdad and other places where the brutality of war destroys the souls of humanity."
Zero Hour in Phnom Penh (2005, Vincent Calvino #3)
WINNER! 2004 German Critics Award for Crime Fiction
WINNER! 2007 Premier Special Director Book Award
Books in this Series
ABOUT THE BOOK
Vivid and scary. Calvino braves the desperate depths of Phnom Penh where people ruined by endless years of violence struggle to find a way forward.
An ex-special-forces vet hires Calvino to go to Cambodia and find a missing associate.
The Night the Lights Went Out in Phnom Penh
WHO IS VINCENT CALVINO?
Sam Spade Reincarnated as Bangkok-Based PI
Hard-living Vincent Calvino, with his big heart and his Brooklyn bravado, brings the big mysteries of Bangkok to life—how to drive, wai, and die like a Thai—while he hunts murderers among Thailand's endlessly corrupt and entitled power brokers.
When this series begins, forty-year old disbarred lawyer Vincent Calvino is down on his luck: jobs are few and far between. He is spending more time drinking than working and has the epic nightmares and hangovers to prove it. His cleaner has started telling him she expects him to expire from a heart attack any day now. Bangkok, she believes, kills all farangs (Westerners) before their time: some combination of Thai hot weather, Bangkok air pollution, Mekhong whiskey, and non-stop nightlife does them in.
