Death of a Blue Lantern

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Police Procedural in Modern Communist China
Review: I am always interested in reading novels set in a place I want to visit. That is what I got in Death of a Blue Lantern plus a lot more. In addition to the plot being set in Beijing, some action occurs in Canton, Shanghai and in the mountains in northern China.

The hero of this novel is Inspector Wang Anzhuang of the Beijing Central Investigations Division. While spending an evening at the opera, Wang finds a dead body in the theater and launches into a complex investigation of the murder, Chinese Triad mob and thefts of precious artifacts. As the investigation unfolds, we see the influence of the communist party on the police department including a mandatory "self-criticism" of each individual's thoughts and actions during the 1989 Tiananmen Square revolution/massacre. Wang is very conflicted about his government's decisions to fire weapons and its impact on the student protestors. His own actions are called into question, making him, in turn, question his commitment to the beliefs of his party versus the more open Western culture.

The ideology does not get in the way of a good police story and in fact some of the party leaders are suspects in certain crimes.

This is an easy read and was a nice follow-up to the Chinese story line in Jeffrey Deaver's Stone Monkey that I recently finished.

Rating:
Summary: could not put it down
Review: this book is so good I did not want to put it down. It was a chinese version of gorky park.