Description:
China might seem like the Sahara Desert for mystery fans who like a good dose of local color with their murders and detection: literary oases are few and far between. Robert Van Gulik's long-popular and carefully detailed Judge Dee series has illuminated 17th-century Chinese life, but modern China, with its hustle and bustle and barely contained chaos, hasn't been on many authorial radar screens. The notable exception: Christopher West's Inspector Anzhuang Wang series (Death of a Blue Lantern, Death of a Red Mandarin, Death on Black Dragon River). For Wang, a detective in the Beijing Central Investigations Department, the tumult of contemporary life is all-encompassing: from Kentucky Fried Chicken to hei ke (black guests, or hackers), Beijing at the turn of the 21st century is a source of endless enlightenment and puzzlement. He's not alone in his confusion: dissatisfaction with the apparent superficiality of ya pi life drives Wang's sister-in-law Julie to join the New Church of the Heavenly Kingdom, a cult that promises its followers redemption in the new millennium. It's bad enough to lose face through a relative's involvement in a religious cult, but when the group's Golden Master is murdered, Wang finds himself drawn reluctantly into an investigation whose resolution is less than eagerly awaited in the upper echelons of the Communist Party. A potentially explosive mix of worry for Julie, respect for authority, and naturally subversive curiosity make Wang's detection anything but straightforward. Moving from the cult's bleak farmland through the incense-laden salons of a con artist faith healer to a factory producing said incense for illegal export, Wang and his wife, Rosina, find themselves ruffling some very important feathers--and facing a millennium celebration more deadly than festive. Unfortunately, West's approach is disconcertingly heavy-handed: his character interpretations lack the light touch that informed the earlier novels in the series, and the story itself hovers between a less-than-subtle portrayal of bureaucratic caprice and a straightforward locked-room murder mystery. Fans of the series, however, will still enjoy Wang's drolly humorous and always timely asides. --Kelly Flynn
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