Crackdown

by Christopher G. Moore

In Crackdown visual art becomes a powerful take down tool to push back against the oligarchs. People adjust to the surveillance state and its agents who are emergent forces. Post-coup Thailand is the setting as high tech competes with traditional power in a battle for hearts and minds. It is a noir landscape where Calvino finds himself ambushed as casualties from this battle leave behind a mystery or two. Calvino enters a world of ancient maps, political graffiti, student protestors and murder. The finger points at Calvino as the killer. He searches for allies who will help him prove his innocence.

Genres: Fiction

ebook

First published March 22, 2015

About the author

Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian author who has lived in Thailand since 1988. Formerly a law professor at the University of British Columbia and a practicing lawyer, Moore has become a public figure in Southeast Asia, known for his novels and essays that have captured the spirit and social transformation of Southeast Asia over the past three decades.

Moore has written over 30 fiction and non-fiction books, including the Vincent Calvino novels which have won including the Shamus Award and German Critics Award and have been translated to over a dozen languages. Moore’s books and essays are a study of human nature, culture, power, justice, technological change and its implications on society and human rights.

Starting in 2017, the London-based Christopher G. Moore Foundation awards an annual literary prize to books advancing awareness on human rights. He’s also the founder of Changing Climate, Changing Lives Film Festival 2020.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant Calvino tale of Bangkok post-coup under the juntas martial law.
Worth noting that while Moore's Calvino series can usually be picked up with any book and read as a standalone, this one draws a lot on the previous two and is probably not the best book in the series for newcomers.
All that aside I found it one of the best in the series, Moore has perfectly captured the mood of Bangkok and Thailands ever changing culture and politics whilst giving a thrilling ride.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moore's previous two books are a must for any full understanding of Crackdown. The odyssey that began with Missing in Rangoon and The Marriage Tree seems finally to end up in a bit of a mishmash of transcendentalism and Jungian collective unconscious, all brought up to date with current technology of the web and future musings about it algorithmic fusions of thought and feeling. Yea, and Twitter and Facebook and smartphones are all over the story. That doesn't appeal to me, although it may to others.

What does appeal to me are the chapters about the Cambodian squatters and their subterranean existence in post-coup Bangkok of 2014. Moore clearly thinks Prayuth and the generals who took power were some sort of totalitarian masterminds. Looking back from 2024, that seems a far fetched fear. (Wonder what Moore thinks of the old Thaksinists now firmly back in power and doing all sorts of oligarchical machinations that the generals never dreamed of?) Oh, well. Lots of allusions to Orwell, Graham Greene, and Henry Miller spice up the epigraphs at the start of each chapter. Make of it what you will.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seemed like reading three different books.
Not my favourite Calvino book

[Randy Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite book in the Vincent Calvino series but you still get insight to the Thai way of thinking

[James Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Latest in the Vincent Calvino series this carefully crafted politically-aware crime novel is set in Bangkok during post-coup military rule. Christopher Moore, having delivered fifteen outings in the Vincent Calvino crime series, has perfected the formula and delivers with unflinching certainty each and every time.

Ballard is a rich businessman compromised by high class hooker cum conceptual artist Christina Tangier. If points were to be awarded for character names this is a clear ten out of ten. Tangier finds fame by photographing rich customers (naked with teddy bear) and exhibiting the shots as modern art instillations.

Calvino's client Osborne is a man who shoots henchmen when not examining the potency of his sperm under a high-powered microscope. Osborne hires Calvino to trail his much younger girlfriend Fah who it turns out is studying politics and inventing political graffiti rather than falling for a younger man as first suspected. Quite which is worse Osborne isn’t sure.

One of these characters takes the big sleep in the long river and things become dark.

Crackdown, for this reader, is a book of symbols. This is a book of dusty maps and edgy political graffiti. A book of warnings, predictions; a well plotted social document.

Books set in countries experiencing enormous social change should perhaps be authored by those such as Moore who realize that often truth can only be heard in fiction.

Crackdown is my favorite in the series so far.