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PERFECT END by William Marshall

PERFECT END

By

Pub Date: March 14th, 1983
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

If the murders are bizarre, the humor is blacker than black, and the narration is maddeningly circuitous, then the locale must be Hong Kong's Yellowthread Street Police Station--and so it is once again, in Marshall's seventh weird concoction. This time six cops are found dead at a neighboring police station; they've been bow-and-arrowed to death, it seems; the other cops have fled; and the station has been left immaculately clean! So at first one of the missing cops is the top suspect--but soon he turns up long-dead. . . and is revealed to have been an undercover man rooting out police corruption (which was apparently rife). Furthermore, yet another cop is speared, the police-establishment seems to be covering something up, clues lead to a fortune-teller and the question of Chinese ritual-burial. . . and, as a typhoon hits H.K., there's a nasty showdown between Yellowthread's whimsical O'Yee and the bowman (who, it turns out, hails from Zimbabwe and is carrying out a grand-scale vengeance operation). Less funny than some previous outings, but as creepily gory as any of them: offbeat, stylish entertainment for those who've acquired a taste for Marshall's decidedly uncongenial approach to the police-procedural.