Book Review: China Trade

Reviewed By: Carl Brookins - RAM

China Trade     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
S. J. Rozan
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Private Investigator
Series: Lydia Chin / Bill Smith # 1
1995, St. Martins, 263 pages, paperback

The debut novel in an interesting and unique series. Rozan has a fresh, exciting voice, and she's developed two lead characters with enormous rapport, yet individual outlooks. Lydia Chin is a young Chinese woman in an unusual profession, that of a licensed PI working in and around the Chinatown of New York. Her partner, when she needs one, is Bill Smith a sixteen-year veteran of the mean streets, but an unusual, white, New York PI. That Smith has fallen for Chin only adds to the luster of this book.

It's January and approaching the Chinese New Year. Chin is still struggling to establish herself as a true professional in a world full of preconceptions and prejudices. She's hired by a small Chinatown museum to find and retrieve some boxes of rare porcelains which were stolen from the museum. Through Lydia Chin, the author guides us into the amazing and shadowy world of Chinese people in America, of gangs, small shops, alternative medicines, and the reclusive obsessive world of people who are fixated on extremely limited aspects of the art world.

There is gripping, detailed action, with almost no letdown in pace, even when we are introduced to some of the more arcane elements of a displaced Chinese culture. The personal by-play between Chin and Smith is always interesting but is never allowed to interfere with the main story line. This is a fine first novel in what one hopes will be a long successful series of adventures.

Carl Brookins - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Carl Brookins - RAM

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