ALL BODY BAGS AND NO KNICKERS

In Ruckus’ mystery novel, sleuths Chance Yang and his wife, Catherine, take on a murder case rooted in the deep past.

In a prologue, an unnamed man is in a hospital; his unnamed sister has died after leaving him cryptic notes urging him to find her killer. The story proper begins in London, with Chance and Catherine’s friends celebrating the opening of Chance’s restaurant. Chance and Catherine marry and head to China for their honeymoon, where the British-born Catherine can meet Chance’s family. Interspersed with their largely pleasant time there are flashback passages from 2005 hinting at something dire happening at a summer camp, accompanied by desperate but disembodied pleas for help. Back in the present, a series of violent deaths occur at an abandoned building site near the place where Chance and Catherine are staying. They're galvanized into action, and the duo piece together what happened back in the past to result in these deaths almost 20 years later. This is a strange book: Chance and Catherine are likable enough, a pair in the tradition of crime-solving husband-and-wife teams such as Nick and Nora Charles, but the action in the first few chapters, set in London, has almost nothing to do (save for the presence of An, Chance’s cousin) with the narrative that unfolds in China—the important part of the plot. Some developments feel like non sequiturs; readers will learn a lot about Chinese cuisine and customs (“By the time Chance returned, the girl was teaching Catherine tongue twisters and jingles in Chinese. ‘Try this. Hong fenghuang, fen fenghuang, fenhong fonghuang, huang fenghuang. This means red phoenix, pink phoenix, pinkish-red phoenix, and yellow phoenix’”). There is a leisurely pace to the proceedings that seems indulgent—at one point, Chance and Catherine both have colonoscopies (there’s a fun date), leaving readers to wonder what their medical procedures add to the story. But such things are a matter of taste, and there are surely readers who like to go with the flow, as it were.

A somewhat odd caper with appealing leads and eccentric structural issues.