The Lake Ching Murders
A Mystery of Fire and Ice
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Possibly Zhong Fong is the only person in all of China who can completely decipher Lily's English, and he hasn't heard from her -- or anyone else -- in fifty-four months. His own English is excellent, but it has been that long since he had a use for it - fifty-four months since Shanghai Head of Special Investigations Zhong had been reduced to convicted political felon Zhong and exiled to the remote and barren north country, far from the crowded bustling world he knew.
Warned by Lily's telegram about "real sucking tons," Zhong doesn't know what to expect and expects the worst. It materializes in the persons of two men whom the former policeman recognizes as a politico and his thug of a bodyguard. He recognizes, too, that they are taking out on him in small but cruel ways their anger that circumstances force them to call upon this "criminal" for assistance. But there has been a mass murder, the victims all influential foreigners. The killings took place on a pleasure boat on Lake Ching, almost within sight of Zhong's hut. It's an area where only Zhong is an investigator with experience, more, with a record of successful cases and that makes him the only one available who can possibly protect China's rulers from something far worse than worldwide embarrassment. Much as they dislike pulling him in on it, they must.
The corollary to that "honor," of course, is that he'd damn well better come up with a solution that gets the government off the hook and allows the completion of the mysterious mission that originally brought the foreigners to remote Lake Ching - or else.
The good news is that he will be back in the living world, and will have Lily, a brilliant student of forensics, and another old crony from Shanghai, whom age and service has made wise in the ways of criminals, as his staff. The bad news is that Zhong is given a limited time to learn what has happened, who is responsible and how to capture them - and that the truth had better not be one that reflects on the Chinese government.
It's a set up that will have readers breathlessly following Zhong and his friends as they frantically trace the methodical killers who drenched the decks and cabins of the lake steamer with blood. It's a search that takes them back north, and to a dark island in the hills over the lake to search out the tribe of hostile near-savages there and learn the startling secret that they carry in their bodies. David Rotenberg's The Lake Ching Murders is the second installment in the Mysteries of Fire and Ice series.
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Canadian Rotenberg's second Detective Zhong novel (after 1998's The Shanghai Murders), with its exotic setting (rural China) and bizarre crime (the murder of a boatload of foreigners), certainly intrigues. Unfortunately, the story reads like a condensed version of a more developed book, failing to convey much sense of place or to give its characters enough room to move about for the reader to get to know them. The pity is that Rotenberg's characters are genuinely interesting, in particular his Chinese equivalent of hillbillies. Det. Zhong Fong, formerly head of Special Investigations in Shanghai, has been condemned as a traitor. First, he was imprisoned, then exiled to a remote village in the north. After two years, two mysterious men rudely throw him into the trunk of a car and drive south. The authorities have a special assignment for Zhong that no one else wants. A pleasure boat that has been burned is frozen in the ice of Lake Ching. Its cargo includes 17 corpses of different nationalities (two American) killed in a variety of gory ways. Who were these people? What were they doing on the lake? And who would hate them enough to kill them in such horrible fashion? From there, the characters multiply like rabbits, while the harrowing plot gets as twisty as a Rubik's Cube. Other mysteries about China, both ancient and modern, may do a better job of exploring the people and culture, but as sheer entertainment this fills the bill.