Sprawling and dense, this novel will satisfy your procedural jones, but don’t look for more than a cursory reckoning with...
Like Columbo but not funny.
This is Soji Shimada Mystery Award winner Chan’s first novel to be translated into English; it's a lengthy, ambitious tale about a legendary detective named Kwan Chun-dok, examining his career from the mid-1960s to the present day—and examining Kwan's beat, Hong Kong, during those fraught, turbulent years. Arranged in free-standing but interconnected novellas, proceeding in reverse chronological order, the book charts Kwan’s evolution from savvy field investigator to head of the force’s intelligence division against the backdrop of such historical events as the 1967 leftist riot, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the epochal handover of 1997. Through these juxtapositions, Chan attempts to embroider both cultural history and psychological character study, but he fails to profitably exploit his setting or word count in this aim; the historical details provide sporadically engaging window dressing, but Chan’s characters seldom address them directly, and Kwan himself remains something of a cipher, a genius at deduction with a generic, Tintin-like good-guy effect. Chan’s strong suit is procedural plotting: the meat of the book is Kwan’s crime-solving, and the author displays a formidable mastery of wrangling complex exposition in scenarios involving such calumny as an escaped nemesis bent on revenge, a kidnapping, and a series of terrorist bombings. Institutional corruption and the public’s growing mistrust of the police emerge as the narrative’s glum, overarching themes, lending the backward storytelling scheme a melancholy poignancy—but, despite Chan's aspirations to historical, cultural, and psychological insight, the real satisfaction here is found in the meat-and-potatoes cops-and-robbers material.
Sprawling and dense, this novel will satisfy your procedural jones, but don’t look for more than a cursory reckoning with the troubled history of Hong Kong.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2588-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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