Awkward and unsure, but animated by Pattison’s fascinating overlay of Buddhist spirituality on the familiar whodunit formula.
Pattison’s second whodunit, once again featuring former Chinese Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun, is longer, more complicated—and, alas, more repetitious than his Edgar Award-winning debut, The Skull Mantra (1999).
Shan, just released from a slave labor camp and now studying Tibetan Buddhism in a secret monastery, complains at several points of being lost in the forbidding wilderness just north of the Indian border. The author offers this image as a metaphor for Shan’s agonizing quest to understand himself, his Chinese origins, and the terrible atrocities the Chinese government condones to break the back of the Tibetan people, but “lost” is also a regrettably apt description of how readers may feel as they try to navigate Pattison’s convoluted plot. Sent as part of a delegation of monks to solve the mystery of a Tibetan teacher’s murder at a distant capitalistic commune, Shan encounters a Khazakh couple carrying a dying child whom, they claim, was savagely butchered by a demon. Shan’s mentor, a monk named Gendun, disappears into the wilderness, leaving Shan to explore the strange relationships among the capitalist commune, a cruel political rehabilitation camp, a group of laptop-toting resistance fighters who call themselves the Maos, a cadre of lethal Chinese soldiers, and a vengeful female prosecutor seemingly intent on persecuting as many Tibetans she can find. More corpses, including a smuggler and other children, pile up as Pattison makes too frequent use of the device that made his debut thriller so marvelous: in the most desolate, lifeless places, Shan discovers hidden caverns, buried cities, a subterranean aqueduct, even an old guided-missile silo. The bulky passages are redeemed by moments of incredible beauty, as when the corpse of the murdered teacher is found inside an ice cavern limned by the handprints ancient and modern visitors.
Awkward and unsure, but animated by Pattison’s fascinating overlay of Buddhist spirituality on the familiar whodunit formula.Pub Date: June 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-20612-7
Page Count: 581
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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