Book Review: The Golden Mountain Murders

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

The Golden Mountain Murders     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
David Rotenberg
Class/Genre:   Mystery
Series: Zhong Fong Mysteries
McArthur & Co., $10.99 mass market, 293 pages

Shanghai has surpassed Hong Kong as Asia’s most productive city, and Inspector Zhong Fong’s Office of Special Investigations is a model of the New China’s efficiency. But along with progress come Western problems, many of which are denied even in the New China. Zhong discovers one of these problems rampant in Anhui Province: AIDS.

In China, the poor often make a living selling their blood to men called “blood heads.” Through this transaction, men and women become infected. Zhong finds the trail leading from Anhui’s blood heads ends in Vancouver, British Columbia: the Golden Mountain. Zhong travels to Canada, doggedly on the trail though he doesn’t know where it will lead. And on his trail is another, an ancient guild assassin out to avenge a lost love. The lost love was Loa Wei Fen, who died at Zhong’s hands nine years earlier. Zhong will have to rely on his friend Robert Cowens, a motley assortment of Chinese Canadians and Tong criminals, and his team back in Shanghai to survive this climb up the Golden Mountain.

I’m a big fan of Rotenberg’s Zhong Fong mysteries. They give a glimpse into a culture that is utterly strange to me. Even though Rotenberg is Canadian, he spent a great deal of time working in Shanghai as an acting instructor and theatre director, and he has become as well acquainted with the culture there as anyone not born to it can be.

Zhong is a well drawn character, a man very much of his culture and yet an outsider. He knows how to work within the system, and when it isn’t beneficial to do so.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM