Sendker’s considerable knowledge of China is not enough to overcome too much philosophizing by self-consciously sensitive...
German novelist Sendker’s second novel (Whispering Shadows, 2015) about a German-American former journalist battling crime in China.
Readers of the author's previous book will be glad to find the protagonist, Paul, leading a quiet life on the island of Lamma, a ferry ride from Hong Kong. He's still grieving for his dead child, but his relationship with travel agent Christine has deepened. After a reading from her astrologer, Christine fears she will bring harm to Paul. Paul visits the astrologer himself to assuage her concerns but is unsettled by the astrologer’s three-sentence prophecy (which is annoyingly withheld from readers for almost 200 pages). Then Christine receives a letter from her older brother, Da Long, whom she’d always assumed died during the Cultural Revolution, around the time she and her mother escaped the mainland to Hong Kong 40 years ago. He asks for help and wants to see her, so Paul accompanies her on what is supposed to be a 48-hour visit. They learn that Da Long’s wife has fallen mysteriously and incurably ill, and so have other neighbors in Da Long’s village as well as the local cats. When Christine returns to Hong Kong as scheduled, Paul stays behind, ostensibly to support Da Long during the visit from a Shanghai neurologist arranged by Da Long’s estranged but politically connected son, Xiao Hu. In fact, Paul begins investigating his suspicions that a factory may be poisoning the water in the nearby lake. He enlists help from Da Long’s daughter, Yin-Yin, a music student, and her journalist friend, Wang. But in his righteous anger, Paul ignores cultural differences as well as the cost to Chinese citizens who speak out against power. He also pays less attention than he should to what's happening in Christine’s life until circumstances force him to realize what matters most.
Sendker’s considerable knowledge of China is not enough to overcome too much philosophizing by self-consciously sensitive characters and a plot that holds few surprises.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9367-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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