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A review by apechild
A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong
3.0
In usual style, I have read the first and third in this series and now I come to the second book. I do enjoy these, although honestly, I do find them a wee bit slow and not the most overly complicated of mysteries. But what makes these books so interesting is just being submerged into the 1990s Shanghai world, with all the little details you really get such a fantastic depiction of what life was like. The world of Communism and Capitalism meeting, overcrowding in the cities, and the people who lived through periods such as the cultural revolution, once again having to adjust to different lifestyles and ways of thinking. It's also a book with a clear love of Chinese poetry (Inspector Chen is a poet in his part time, and does like to tell us about the lines of poems he's thinking of) and a love of food. You're always told about the wierd and wonderful things people are having for their dinner. And this is proper Chinese food, not what we get at Chinese restaurants in the UK, which I suppose is a fragmented version to suit our tastes. Because in China everything is eaten. Everything. Duck blood soup anyone?
This is a proper culture clash for this book as Inspector Chen is assigned to look after US Marshall Catherine Rohn. She's come over to collect Wen Liping, wife of Feng who is already in the US and about to give evidence against the human traffickers. But he won't until he's got his wife with him. And she's disappeared....Wen Liping was a loyal character dancer and model citizen during the cultural revolution, but from what they find out has become a shadow of herself since that time. In the meantime a body that appears to have been murdered by one of the triad gangs turns up in Bund Park, Inspector Chen has a feeling they're being followed, and that the gangsters have an uncanny way of knowing what they're up to, when only police colleagues are supposed to know...
This is a proper culture clash for this book as Inspector Chen is assigned to look after US Marshall Catherine Rohn. She's come over to collect Wen Liping, wife of Feng who is already in the US and about to give evidence against the human traffickers. But he won't until he's got his wife with him. And she's disappeared....Wen Liping was a loyal character dancer and model citizen during the cultural revolution, but from what they find out has become a shadow of herself since that time. In the meantime a body that appears to have been murdered by one of the triad gangs turns up in Bund Park, Inspector Chen has a feeling they're being followed, and that the gangsters have an uncanny way of knowing what they're up to, when only police colleagues are supposed to know...