Water Touching Stone (Inspector Shan Tao Yun Novels)
Given the critical and commercial success of Eliot Pattison's Edgar-winning debut novel,The Skull Mantra, which painstakingly limned contemporary Tibet's harsh beauty and defiant fatalism through the stoic perspective of Shan Tao Yun, a Chinese bureaucrat imprisoned in a Himalayan labor camp, it's no wonder the author's second novel returns to this hauntingly scarred country. ButWater Touching Stonealso widens the author's geographical and social scope. Shan must find a killer who is stalking orphan boys in the high mountains and deserts of the Xianjiang Autonomous Region.Gendun, the senior lama at the monastery that has given Shan sanctuary, announces to his student, "'You are needed in the north. A woman named Lau has been killed. A teacher. And a lama is missing.'" Though reluctant to leave the gentle presence of the monks who are balm to his crippled soul, Shan realizes he has no choice:Gendun had told him the one essential truth of the event; for the  lamas everything else would be mere rumor. What they had meant was that this  lama and the dead woman with a Chinese name were vital to them, and it was for  Shan to discover the other truths surrounding the killing and translate them for the lamas' world.It turns out that Lau had taken upon herself the care of the zheli, a group of  orphaned children from all corners of Xianjiang, and strove to help the children  retain a sense of native identity in the face of the Poverty Eradication Scheme,  which is Beijing-speak for the destruction of the herding clans and the  transformation of the western steppes into a region of exploitable resources.  Shan wonders whether officials from the People's Brigade (perhaps the "Jade  Bitch," Prosecutor Xu Li), or the feared secret police "knobs" from Public  Security decided to put a stop to her subversive activities. But when the  children from the zheli begin dying amid horrific tales of the "demon" that came  for them, bleak politics must grapple with darker imaginings.The novel sports a practically Dickensian cast of characters, which might  overwhelm the narrative by sheer numbers, yet Pattison manages to add depth to  even the most minor of characters, and at the moments when the troupe threatens  to become completely unwieldy, he deftly redeems the situation with moments of  quiet poetry:On they went, three small men in the vastness of the changtang, the  wind sweeping the grass in long waves around them, the snow-capped peaks  shimmering in the brilliant light of dawn. As they appeared over a small knoll  they surprised a herd of antelope, which fled across the long plain. Except one,  a small animal with a broken horn, which stared as if it recognized them, then  ran beside them, alone, until they reached the road.--Kelly  Flynn--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.