The Cultural Detective

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, Missing in Rangoon plays out beneath the moving shadows of the cross-border drug barons. Pratt and Calvino’s lives are entangled with the invisible forces inside the old regime and their allies who continue to play by their own set of rules.

A Killing Smile begins the Land of Smiles trilogy. Lawrence Baring, a successful Los Angeles attorney, had lost his wife, Sarah. He discovers after her suicide that Sarah had maintained a long-distance affair with Robert Tuttle. Baring travels to Bangkok for a showdown with Tuttle who has become a long-time resident of the Bangkok underworld.

In this cult classic tale of betrayal and exploitation, Baring and Tuttle circle each other inside Thai culture where language and way of life deliver multidimensional surprises. In his quest for revenge, Baring learns true meaning of friendship and the secrets behind the smile.

The Cultural Detective established Christopher G. Moore as a writer whose essays deliver a unique perspective insight into Thai culture and contemporary political and social issues. In Faking It in Bangkok gangsters, gamblers, killers and other criminals are brought to life in the essays. Readers who follow Moore’s crime novels will enjoy his detours through the hard-edged noir world of Thailand with whistle stops on the digital age express. Moore’s signature irony and humor riffs are also not to be missed as he explores an eclectic range of subjects, from ghosts and fortunetellers to the de facto tribal seating on the BTS.

Steve hasn’t had it easy--from a tough childhood, brought up by his mother in Chicago, to his introduction to the world of porn film making, where he rapidly rises to stardom and wealth, to his new occupation servicing high class women in the Bangkok red light district--life has led him down some sordid and precarious paths. But his latest predicament--holed up in a seaside village on the run from a bunch of drug dealers--has got to take the cake. Will Carla, the gorgeously sexy American-Thai porn star who brought him to Thailand in the first place, be his salvation?

Warnings: This title contains graphic language, sex, exploitation and prostitution.

But what if everyone is wrong?

When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment -- and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. For, as Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought, people actually think about -- and even see -- the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" -- drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to catergories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.

The Geography of Thought documents Professor Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology, a series of comparative studies both persuasive in their rigor and startling in their conclusions, addressing questions such as:

• Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry, the brilliant achievement of such Greeks as Euclid?

• Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings?

• Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the other way around in East Asia?

• What are the implications of these cognitive differences for the future of international politics? Do they support a Fukuyamaesque "end of history" scenario or a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations"?

Rahu, God of Darkness, has unraveled the safety nets in the City of Angels. Even the rich are in a free-fall state when the Thai economic boom goes bust in 1997. A young American, Hurley Ransom Conover, follows his Thai girlfriend to her homeland and finds himself at the center of her family’s turmoil. Hurley trips along the edges of Bangkok days and nights giving the performance of his life as the rela-tionship with his girlfriend falls apart and her father needs him to rescue the family empire.

“The stories of other writers—locals and expats—maybe likened to sketches or drawings, while those of Christopher G. Moore are paintings or murals.”–-Bangkok Post