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.