Christopher “Kit” Ellingsworth was given an Earldom for his bravery during the Napoleonic wars. It doesn’t really bring in any money, though, so Kit is pretty much penniless and mounting up debts living the life of a libertine upon his return to London, everything to forget his time in battle. Hence he is surprised when he is told his mentor wishes to leave him a substantial fortune…as long as he finds a wife within the next month. It doesn’t leave him very much time to […]
A trip down the Yangtze …. with a corpse!
The final volume of the “Red Princess” trilogy, Dragon Bones had me captured from the get-go. The author introduces us to the mighty Yangtze River in China by portraying the voyage of a corpse as it is swept, crashing and smashing and sometimes floating its way through the Three Gorges and the massive dam of that name still under construction, until fetching up on the outskirts of a city, setting the stage for an investigation by our intrepid couple Detective Liu Hulan and her […]
Chinese/U.S. Relations Viewed Through the Lens of a Murder Mystery
Flower Net is the first of a trilogy by this author, whose Snow Flower and the Secret Fan blew me away when I read it several years ago. This book travels back and forth between the U.S. and China in 1997, and is an incisive political commentary couched in a splendid if somewhat gruesome murder mystery. Liu Hulan is a beautiful young Chinese detective who has had to fight hard to achieve her respected status, but has to contend with the fact that is a […]