All the standard mystery elements are present, detective with a past, sidekick, stolen treasure, murder, a setting that manages to be both exotic and seamy at the same time.it is more than that as the author also explores Chinese history and politics and family relations ( )

Not a great mystery, but an interesting book about China ( )

This is the first outing for Mei Wang, a female private investigator in Beijing China. There was interesting stuff in this novel about China and how things get done but Mei Wang as a PI was not convincing and the crime story in the end appeared a distraction to other things. ( )

Very confusing. I think the author implied solutions but I finished the book feeling like I didn't really know what had happened. ( )

Private detectives are banned in China but Mei Wang, who once had a stable job in the Ministry of Public Security thought that there was a need for the services she could provide. In Beijing there many small crimes that the police will not involve themselves with and in the new millennium divorce is becoming more common place so Mei could find independence as a business woman. All she had to do was market herself as an Information Consultant.

One of Mei Wang's earliest memories is of her life in a labor camp with her father who was an intellectual condemned for his idealism to hard labor for the rest of his life. One day her mother came and got her and bore her away on a bus while she waved goodbye to her father, not realizing that she would never see him again.

She became disillusioned with her work at the MPS and left their although her family was aghast at her decision to leave the security off a government job and all the perks that went with it. Her mother's position was that she was throwing away her future because what mattered in China was not money but power. None the less Mei liked her independence and she determined not to brood about the past.

One day a Mr. Chen Jitian made an appointment to see her. She knew him better as Uncle Chen a great friend of her mother over the years. He cames to see her and told a story that began in the winter of 1968 when the couuntry was being terrorized by the Red Guard. Thise roving bands of "patriots'includind homes, stores and even museums from which theu destroeyed the relics and burned everything by building great bonfires and fed them with all the artwork, documents and records.

Now in the present some of these artifacts are surfacing, in particular an ancient ceremonial bowl. It appears that someone had stolen some things before everything was destroyed. Now the bowl had been sold to an antique dealer. Uncle Chen is looking for a jade seal belonging to a long ago Chinese ruler that he thinks was taken from a museum at the same time as the bowl. He asks Mei to find it for him.

The first thing Mei does is find search for the person who sold the bowl, but when she finds him he has just been murdered. Interestingly, although she has discovered a dead body she is never interviewed by the authorities. But now the game is afoot and Mei backtracks through recent history to find the connections that will lead her to the stolen artifacts as well as to a new understanding of her own past. The era of the cultural revolution was filled with death, destruction and secrets.
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