A strained historical crime yarn whose central gumshoe is much too flat-footed.
Shanghai between the world wars provides the backdrop for a photographer embroiled in an underworld of gangsters, gunrunners, Communist insurgents, and two bewitching women.
The first novel by Bai translated into English centers on Hsueh, a photojournalist of French-Chinese extraction who’s arriving in Shanghai with his lover, Therese, an arms dealer. An army officer on the boat is assassinated after it docks, and his wife, Leng, mysteriously disappears. Much of the story takes place in the French-administered pocket of the city, which is more lawless than those run by the British, Americans, or Chinese, but the local police still want to get to the bottom of the killing, and Hsueh is soon roped in to report on Therese’s dealings and Leng’s connection to a Communist cell. “Hsueh never let himself think too hard about ethics, consequences, the meaning of life, things like that,” Bai writes of the novel’s hero—a line that, like many in this story, strives for noirish flintiness but largely feels inert, plodding, and overly convoluted. Over the course of the two months depicted in the novel, Hsueh connects romantically with both Therese and Leng while uncovering plots to smuggle machine guns and rob banks, but all this talk of sex and violence lacks much energy, and what’s meant to be comic banter between Hsueh and the French officers often curdles. Some of the novel’s flaws may be matters of translation—sentences are larded with clichés, non sequiturs (“the sky was dream bright”), or just plain stiff phrasing (“he felt as though he had been caught between the cogwheels of two sophisticated killing machines”). But Bai has written a story so tangled that its concluding explosions inevitably have all the force of a pop gun.
A strained historical crime yarn whose central gumshoe is much too flat-footed.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-231345-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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