One Red Bastard (Robert Chow)
Lin’s engaging Robert Chow series (Snakes Can’t Run, 2010) continues. Just months after Chow broke up a human smuggling operation in New York’s Chinatown, his girlfriend, Lonnie, gets the chance to interview a representative for Mao’s daughter, Li Na, who may be seeking asylum in the U.S. (It is 1976. Mao is dead, Madame Mao is in prison for her membership in the Gang of Four, and the People’s Republic is in turmoil.) But shortly after the interview, the representative is murdered, and Lonnie is the last person who saw him alive. Chow, on track to become a detective after joining the NYPD to be the sole Chinese face of the police in Chinatown, suddenly finds clearing Lonnie his top priority. As in previous novels, Lin does a fine job sketching a mid-seventies Manhattan beset by financial crisis, a Chinatown roiled by events half a world away, and the and family and community dynamics of Chinatown’s insular inhabitants. Readers drawn to crime fiction that illuminates other eras and other cultures will find much to savor here. --Thomas Gaughan