A Vincent Calvino crime novel
Eighteenth in the series
It's the year 2036. Bangkok is divided into semi-autonomous, districts. In District #3, Calvino works a case involving a reality show winner, the streets are overrun by crazies, freaks, and AI. An evangelical preacher is using the show to convert the Thais. Calvino and his crew work as a security detail in District #3 and on a superyacht where neo feudal lords gather to bid for a Thai bride. Calvino investigates the link between exclusive compounds in the Blue Zone and the new reality space of π.
Review
District #3, the latest in the Calvino series by Christopher G. Moore, is the most assured narrative in the recent series. While touching on earlier themes explored in books like The Big Weird, this one thrusts us into an eco-thriller with future Bangkok being gradually destroyed by climate change and social decline. As ever, the Bangkok streets aren't safe at night. Crazies patrol the dark corners in every zone in town with a slow but menacing, plodding threat—zombie-like, consuming. But when was Bangkok ever anything less than a meat grinder for the naïve nocturnal flâneur?
Hangovers from digital nightmares are realized in technicolor as we're thrown into dystopic televised funeral broadcasts hosted by celebrity influencers, memorializing corpses in the casket with a karaoke number. The death toll is high. Dark eulogies are written by ChatGPT. The descent into our own dark realities flashes past us with the speed of the Mass Transit Network—a network that keeps running amid chaos and despair. The narrator is a cool lizard's eye surveying the debris of the last few decades with the detached precision of a trained neurosurgeon.
Those readers, like I, who dipped a gouty toe into the early books from Moore will not be disappointed by this recent shift to future shock. Moore's work has always been an exercise in world-building. The past Calvino tales often fell short of employing a tight, economic plot, instead being led by character, location, and, most importantly, the building of the city. The uncanny otherness of our new surroundings cushions us in the comfort of our despair. This novel will no doubt attract new audiences—a postcard from the future but date-stamped with the present. Under the belief that climate change will flood our cities, we inflate energy costs and cripple the poor.
If the risk is real, we all sink. Either way, the crazies lose. The crazies always lose, apart from the few who find love and wealth in a reality television show, pairing themselves—as they do in this book—with affluent benefactors in the guise of love. Moore's work captures the pulse of the city of Bangkok in ways few others have achieved over the years, shaping our collective imagination of Bangkok long before the internet, YouTube, or even the beloved pygmy hippo that has since captured the hearts of us all.
Moore's focus has shifted with District #3, and this swing is essential to the growth of the dwindling Bangkok Noir movement. Sociological and environmental anxieties are on offer in the package of an open satirical sandwich at Café Moore, should you wish to take a bite.
By James Newman, Thailand Expat Writers List 12 January 2025
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