Rating: 
Summary: Sumptuously Hard-Boiled
Review: With this sumptuously hard-boiled fifth installment in her acclaimed Lydia Chin-Bill Smith series -- which gracefully alternates between the voice of Lydia, a gutsy PI born and raised in New York's Chinatown, and her off-again, on-again partner, Bill -- Shamus-winning Rozan will no doubt regale her fans. Hired to find four waiters who've gone missing from the Dragon Garden, a busy dim sum establishment owned by a local Cantonese power player, Lydia gets herself a job as a waitress and goes to work on the joint, all the while offering insight into how the community power structure has been transformed as Fukienese-speaking immigrants have superseded the older Cantonese. And soon enough Lydia and Bill uncover a mystery -- involving drug-smuggling, alien-smuggling and dissident-smuggling -- that brings that ethnic conflict into sharp focus. All in all, a beautiful and gripping novel, brimming with spice, complexity and suspense. (And food -- enormous, mouth-watering quantities of it.) --APBnews.com
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