THE LAKE CHING MURDERS

For the past four years, Zhong Fong, former head of Special Investigations in the Shanghai District, has been kept a political prisoner in isolation to the west of the Great Wall. Now, he is bundled into the trunk of a car and deposited in the countryside near Xian, where two Beijing functionaries explain to him that his future depends on his solving the murder of 17 foreigners—two Caucasians, five Japanese, three Koreans, and seven Chinese—aboard a pleasure craft on Lake Ching. Inspector Chen, they say, will assist him, but Fong insists on using his former forensic specialist and coroner as well. A study of crime-scene photographs convinces them that clues implicating the Triads and poor Hesheng from the Island of the Half-Wits are not nearly as important as a terra-cotta shard, probably from a Xian site excavated by Dr. Roung. To win his freedom, Fong must discover not only why the butchered foreign scientists were so bemused by the Island of Half-Wits, but why someone else’s dead wife so obsessed Dr. Roung, and why the Beijing politicos were using the Lake Ching murders to ferret out a traitor in their ranks.

A classic puzzle, with complicated motives, oddball clues, a unique setting, and a weary detective (The Shanghai Murders, 1998) whose dreams are filled with images of a mongoose crawling up his spine.