Vincent Calvino
1 primary work • 5 total works
Book 16
When Calvino is hired by a retired Thai general to deal with a corrupt and deadbeat tenant, he almost immediately has to evade an assassination attempt. Figuring that it might be best to lay low for a while, Calvino heads for the beach. But trouble only follows him there, as a beautiful young woman falls to her death from the hotel room above his.
Back in Bangkok, Calvino is hired to tail a politician running for election. His investigation draws him into a shady world of private contractors, UN officials, and city politics. As he closes in on his target, his run of bad luck brings him ever closer to danger until Calvino realises he could be the target himself.
A freelance cameraman scraping by on the margins, Hutton had photographed something shortly before his death that he thought would make his career. Now the footagea shocking execution on the Thai/Burmese borderis running repeatedly on CNN, and the rights to Hutton’s life story have been sold to a Hollywood producer. But who killed Hutton and why? When Calvino investigates, he collides with a powerful filmmaker and an experienced old Asia hand who knows the terrain as well as our man in Bangkok. It’s all Calvino can do to stay alive, and find out who killed his fellow American.
The Bangkok police have a confession from a nineteen-year-old drug addict admitting to the murder of the British computer geek (though judging from the bruises on the suspect's face at the press conference, it appears they may have used more than a little gentle persuasion to get it). Case closed? Apparently so: only there are some loose ends that the police and just about everyone else is happy to overlook. Everyone except Vincent Calvino.
Calvino's investigations into Hoadly's murder pitch him into Bangkok's darkest heart. From the red-light district of Patpong to the slums of Klong Toey, Vincent must navigate a world of gangsters, godfathers and crooked police, and try to outwit - and outrun - the professional hit men who have orders to stop him. It seems that this former public schoolboy kept some very dubious company. Featuring drug addicts, dope dealers, fortune tellers, and high-class call girls, The Spirit House is a hard-boiled page-turner that brings the contradictions of Bangkok to disturbing, exhilarating, life.