In the depths of a Beijing winter, during the waning days of Deng Zioping's reign, the U.S. ambassador's son is found dead -- his body entombed in a frozen lake. Almost simultaneously, American officials find a ship adrift in the storm-churned waters off Southern California. No one is surprised to find the fetid hold crammed with hundreds of undocumented Chinese immigrants -- the latest cargo in the Chinese mafia's burgeoning smuggling trade.
What does surprise U.S. District Attorney David Starke is his discovery that among the hapless refugees lies the corpse of a "Red Prince," the name given to a child of China's political elite.
The Chinese and American governments both suspect that the deaths are linked and, in an unprecedented move, they join forces to solve this cross-cultural crime. Stark heads for Beijing to team up with Liu Hulan, whose unorthodox methods are tolerated only because of her spectacular investigative abilities. Their investigation carries them (and the reader) into virtually every corner of today's China -- from the glitzy karaoke bars where the nation's new elite cut deals, to the labyrinthine hutongswhere working-class Chinese have lived and died for centuries.
Here is China as readers have never seen it: a surpassingly strange nation at once admirable and frightening. Here too is an utterly original story more taut and timely than anything else on the fiction shelves today.
If the book has a weakness, it's the revived romance between Liu and David. It seemed irrelevant to be crime solving and not very interesting.
This review is based on the six-hour abridged tape version. I found that the plot followed pretty well. The narrator, an American-Chinese woman was a mixed blessing. Certainly there were aspects of the story where her underlying speach patterns were perfect but sometimes her tone was a bit awkward.
Bottom-line: A nice change of pace from mysteries set in the US or England. Not great literature but I learned some new things and like Liu enough to want to read a sequel.
