New Mysteries on the Shelves (7)

I can have good luck when looking on the fiction shelves when mysteries are concerned at this library and I had more luck this afternoon. The first book I noticed is a debut novel by Henry Chang entitled Chinatown Beat. Billed as "a Detective Jack Yu Investigation," this book is set in New York's Chinatown with Detective Yu pursuing a serial rapist. Yu, who grew up in Chinatown, has contacts with friends--criminals among them--that play a role in his investigation of the rapes and also a murder case he works. And not to any pressure to Yu, but he is new to his police department that is idenitified as being "ninety-nine percent white." This book is credited for giving the reader a close-up view of Chinatown and Chinese-Americans. The book is 214 pages.

The second book is Forests of the Night: a Johnny Hawke novel by David Stuart Davies. It features a private investigator during World War II in London who's hired to check into a woman's mysterious death. This woman was apparently living a double life. Now, what leads Hawke into detective work during the war? Well, this former soldier had a rifle accident which cost him the use of his left eye. And this book, like the first, is the first of a new series. Forests is 222 pages.

Book club discusses "The Fourth Sacrifice"

Last week, the book club discussed Peter May's The Fourth Sacrifice, the second of his series featuring an American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell teamed with Chinese police detective Li Yan in his home of Beijing. This series has recently come stateside while in the United Kingdom, there are six novels according to May's webpage.

It can be ideal to read the first book of a series--particularly for a book club--but our library system had more copies of the Sacrifice than that first book The Firemaker. And a long-standing goal for this book club is to find books for everyone in a area library. As a result, I surrendered my copy of the book of a brief period to pass on another in the book club. So, I read
Firemaker instead.

Sacrifice is the story of Yan's investigation of a series of grim murders--"execution-style decapitations" (ugh)--and the eventual involvement of Campbell whose personal life is undergoing dramatic changes. Overall, the book club was favorably impressed with the writing, characters and stories. One attendee said he seems to write like a woman (there is a strong romance element to the books). Another person found the sense of place in Beijing very convincing in the book and another found Campbell's character simply arrogant and an "ugly American" type. Truth be told, Campbell was a "jerk" in some regards but the author lightens her image with a sad tragic background story.

Overall, the stories are good without very involved mysteries and ultimately, I was told, a good choice for the book club.