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.