Eye of Jade Mystery I love this story! It's a fast, compelling read. If you're a fan of Sujata Massey you'll love this book! Not too short and not too long. Print size is very readable. This is a first novel in a new detective series; it's a thrilling and fascinating journey through modern China. Mei Wang is a successful female private investigator in Beijing. A family friend comes to her with a case ----- a search for a valuable jade piece of the Han dynasty. Tha Eye of Jade was looted from a museum during the Cultural Revolution. The hunt for the precious aetifact draws Mei Wang into a troubled period of long-buried dark family secrets. Excellent read! Filled with fascinating detail! A thoughtful look at a contemporary, independent woman . An examination of China old and new. Enjoyable prose.
Disappointing Maybe it's my inexperience with the mystery genre, but I just couldn't lose myself in this book. I'd heard an interview with the author on NPR and was excited to read it. However, I found the characters hard to follow and the magical, coincidental unraveling of the mystery unrealistic. There's also an entire paragraph in the book in which the protagonist is attacked in her apartment that is entirely out of place with the rest of the book and leads me to believe it was the result of an incomplete redaction. Even the ending was disappointing. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations after the glowing review on NPR...Interesting first novel, satisfying but has some weak spots I am a big fan of Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen books, which are set in Shanghai, but I really like Beijing, so when I saw that this was set there, I ordered it. I just finished it. It wasn't outstanding, but it was satisfying. Maybe I am giving it bonus points because I really appreciated some of the passages where she was out and about in Beijing.
I did have some trepidation because the main character's name was Mei, and most of the fiction set in China I have read that features women named Mei is pretty hackneyed. Sooner or later there always seems to be a wizened old man quoting the I Ching, a dragon lady in a black silk qipao smoking a cigarette with a holder, sinister government officials, triads, a good looking foreigner who saves the woman named Mei, and so forth. Fortunately this novel was above that. I do wish that novels set in China would start using names other than Mei for their women, especially when the women are supposed to have been raised in an educated family.
As I alluded to earlier, my favorite parts of the book are when the protagonist, Mei, is out and about in Beijing, actually doing detective work, exploring Beijing's gritty underbelly and dealing with the down-and-outs. The dialogue was done especially well, the author does a nice job of capturing the flavor of conversation in Beijing, which tends toward the very earthy. The highlight was the time she was at the train station and then at Liulichang, a dumpling restaurant, a mahjong parlor, and a poor and run-down hutong neighborhood. Those pages really do a nice job of portraying the gritty underbelly of Beijing, and offer some nicely realized sketches of the lives of some of the people who are being left behind, or are struggling. The visit to a state-run teahouse is a wonderful record of what service used to be like in Beijing. Mei's reunions with her Peking University classmates are nicely done. Mei's visits to a hospital provide a nice snapshot of the health care system there. Although I wonder how many readers will appreciate the difference between the 309 and 301 hospitals. Anyone who has spent time in Beijing will understand the significance of the 301 hospital, but I suspect it will be cryptic to anyone else.
Unfortunately, though, a disproportionate amount of the book is taken up by melodrama centered on Mei's family and her own personal life. Some of it turns out to be relevant to the plot, but overall there is too much of it, enough to be tiresome. Much of it seems authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was an element of autobiography in some of Mei's interactions with her relatives, but somewhere along the way some of the histrionics become a distraction.
One distraction for me were the oddities with the pinyinization of names. At various points, Mao Zedong is written Mao Zhedong, Houhai is written Hohai, Anhui is written Ann Hui, rock musician Cui Jian's name is written Cu Jian, and Chaoyang is written Chongyang.
Even if this book does have some flaws, it does have its rewards. There is a lot of potential, and I do look forward to reading additional novels in this series.
A Whole New World #1 Mei Wang mystery set in modern-day Beijing, China. Mei Wang is a young woman in her twenties who left her job at the Ministry of Security because she refused to play the game and become one of the ministers' mistress. Of course in doing so, she lost face and most of her acquaintances think she 'lost' her job. Now with her own business as an "information consultant" (since private detectives are forbidden by the government) she struggles along to make ends meet and has a hard time getting people to take her seriously, being that she is a young woman. When an old family friend whom she calls "Uncle Chen" comes to hire her to find a Han Dynasty artifact, she eagerly takes on the case and ends up in hot water several times before solving the crime.
A lot of this book was setting the stage for Mei's future exploits, I think--letting us get to know her and her background. Mei's father died in the labor camps when she was just a small girl, which colored pretty much her whole life. Her mother struggled to raise Mei and her sister Lu, who is now marrying a rich businessman, and of course Mei as the unmarried older sister, is never in favor. When her mother suffers a stroke and ends up in hospital, despite the fact that they don't get on well, Mei is devastated. I had a hard time getting "into" the book--Mei did seem in some ways to be a rather silly young woman, but I have to admit she did mature somewhat by the end, confronting several ghosts from her past. The strength of the book was an introduction to life in modern-day Beijing (somewhere I'd never been before) with the kow-towing that must be done to stay on the good side of the government, and even to get decent medical care. She also didn't shy away from showing the whole spectrum of life, from the dark, seedy areas to the beautiful gardens and areas where the wealthy live. These aspects were very interesting, and even though the mystery itself was rather weak and almost a sideline, I'm willing to cut the author some slack and see if her second effort is a little beefier in content. Not much of a case Private detectives are officially banned in China, so Mei Wang has to call her Beijing agency an "information consultancy." Mei is 30 years old, beautiful and unmarried. Her male secretary Gupin is a country boy from a farming village who's determined to do well in the big city.
Uncle Chen, a family friend, hires Mei to find a jade seal from the Han Dynasty that was stolen from a museum during the Cultural Revolution.
Although someone gets murdered in the course of Mei's inquiries, the police take no notice of the murder, and Mei never seems to be in any personal danger. The case is frankly a bit dull, and destined to fizzle out.
More interesting are Mei's interactions with her family. There's also some mystery about her father's death in a labor camp, which Mei will incidentally unravel.
I'm very attracted to books that give an inside picture of the new China. From this point of view, THE EYE OF JADE is worth reading. But I would not give the writer high marks for character development or writing style. The characters don't really come alive. And there are too many gratuitous metaphors that interrupt and detract from the narrative.
