Sendker’s considerable knowledge of China is not enough to overcome too much philosophizing by self-consciously sensitive...
German novelist Sendker’s second novel (Whispering Shadows, 2015) about a German-American former journalist battling crime in China.
Readers of the author's previous book will be glad to find the protagonist, Paul, leading a quiet life on the island of Lamma, a ferry ride from Hong Kong. He's still grieving for his dead child, but his relationship with travel agent Christine has deepened. After a reading from her astrologer, Christine fears she will bring harm to Paul. Paul visits the astrologer himself to assuage her concerns but is unsettled by the astrologer’s three-sentence prophecy (which is annoyingly withheld from readers for almost 200 pages). Then Christine receives a letter from her older brother, Da Long, whom she’d always assumed died during the Cultural Revolution, around the time she and her mother escaped the mainland to Hong Kong 40 years ago. He asks for help and wants to see her, so Paul accompanies her on what is supposed to be a 48-hour visit. They learn that Da Long’s wife has fallen mysteriously and incurably ill, and so have other neighbors in Da Long’s village as well as the local cats. When Christine returns to Hong Kong as scheduled, Paul stays behind, ostensibly to support Da Long during the visit from a Shanghai neurologist arranged by Da Long’s estranged but politically connected son, Xiao Hu. In fact, Paul begins investigating his suspicions that a factory may be poisoning the water in the nearby lake. He enlists help from Da Long’s daughter, Yin-Yin, a music student, and her journalist friend, Wang. But in his righteous anger, Paul ignores cultural differences as well as the cost to Chinese citizens who speak out against power. He also pays less attention than he should to what's happening in Christine’s life until circumstances force him to realize what matters most.
Sendker’s considerable knowledge of China is not enough to overcome too much philosophizing by self-consciously sensitive characters and a plot that holds few surprises.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9367-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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