171. "The Skull Mantra" by Elliot Pattison

I had trouble getting through Elliot Pattison's The Skull Mantra, not because of any flaw with the book itself--it's well written, vividly depicts the harsh beauty of Tibet, and provides a sensitive, valuable introduction to the region's traditional culture and religion--but because of the bleakness of life in the Chinese gulags.

Shan, the main character, is a former police detective sentenced to an indefinite period of labor in Tibet. One of the few Chinese prisoners in a brigade of Tibetans, he comes to embrace the teachings and philosophy of the brigade's abbot. His loyalty becomes a tool against him, however, when his work crew discovers a headless body buried under some rocks. The colonel in charge of the county's military defenses enlists Shan to investigate the murder, even as the rival Department of Public Safety conducts its own investigation. He tells Shan that any attempt to escape or failure to solve the crime will result in mass executions in his brigade. Mysterious encounters with rebels and monks, visits to remote monasteries, and the discovery of a secret colony hewn out of the cliffs serve as valuable clues to a crime that extends far beyond what Shan could have imagined.

In the end, the book has what my college friend Becca called a "redemptive" ending, and despite my struggles with the harshness of the Chinese treatment of Tibet, I plan to read the next installment in the series.

166. "The Godfather of Kathmandu" by John Burdett

I thoroughly enjoyed John Burdett's first three novels featuring Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, so I was eager for the fourth, The Godfather of Kathmandu. However, it was difficult to follow, convoluted, and ultimately disappointing. Sonchai, reeling from the death of his son (which, he explains, is due to his own bad karma and/or his expressed willingness to suffer to achieve Buddhist enlightenment), is drawn into the investigation into the murder of an American film director. The investigation and Sonchai's other role, as consigliere to his corrupt boss (see above reference to bad karma), take the detective to Kathmandu, where he meets a mysterious spiritual guru and a beautiful woman schooled in the ways of tantric sex. Back home in Bangkok, he pursues a connection between the dead film director and an aristocratic, semi-insane, also beautiful doctor of pharmaceuticals. A late connection to gem trading necessitates a trip to Hong Kong and ties together various loose strands, but also adds another dimension to a plot already heady with dimensions.

Conclusion: Definitely not a good introduction to the series, and even die-hard fans might struggle with this one.

163. "The Merry Misogynist" by Colin Cotterill

The Merry Misogynist has just murdered his fifth wife and is ready to move on to the sixth at the opening of Colin Cotterill's latest (well, latest available in paperback) entry in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. However, the body of Wife #5 is discovered, and soon Dr. Siri, the 73-year-old coroner of Laos, and his cohorts are on the trail of the killer. Dr. Siri, who sees ghosts and serves as host to the spirit of ancient shaman Yeh Ming, also embarks on a quest to find Crazy Rajid, a homeless Indian who hasn't been seen at any of his usual haunts. Accompanied by his new wife, Madame Daeng (who makes the best noodles in Vientiane), Dr. Siri pursues both investigations, despite his age and declining health.

The book takes place in Laos in the late 1970s, after the Communist takeover. Dr. Siri's joyous, mischievous, and irascible personality, as well as his loyalty to anyone who needs his help, tempters the grimness of the Pathet Lao regime.

150. "The Gigolo Murder" by Mehmet Murat Somer

The Gigolo Murder by Mehmet Murat Somer is set in two locales that might be exotic and unfamiliar to most readers (as they were to me): Istanbul, Turkey, and specifically its drag culture. Our narrator, a computer hacker by day, hosts a drag club by night. No sooner does she become infatuated with a wealthy lawyer than his brother-in-law is arrested for murdering a minibus driver and gigolo. Our intrepid heroine, who models her wardrobe choices on Audrey Hepburn's movie attire, sets out to investigate.

This is a fun, delightfully campy read. I plan to read the first in the series, The Kiss Murder, and I hope for more entries, although the fact that both titles are remaindered on Amazon (and I picked this one up in the $1 bin at Borders) doesn't seem auspicious.

65. "The Girl Who Played with Fire" by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played with Fire continues the stories of Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and their friends, lovers, and coworkers. Blomkvist and his colleagues at Millennium magazine purchase an article and book about sex trafficking, but before the drafts are finalized, the journalist who wrote the pieces and his girlfriend/fellow researcher are killed. Evidence at the crime scene implicates Salander, who goes into hiding, mistrustful of the authorities. Blomkvist refuses to believe she's guilty, and his parallel investigation uncovers information about her past, including her reasons for that mistrust. 

The cliffhanger ending definitely left me eager to read the final installment in the trilogy. Kudos to Stieg Larsson for his casual gender equality--unlike too many American authors (who use male characters' last names and female characters' first names), he uses most of the characters' last names consistently. On the other hand, he doesn't seem to be quite clear about which events from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo happened when, or how long ago.

Like its predecessor, this book isn't for those who prefer their books without excessive violence and disturbing depictions (albeit for the purpose of highlighting the disturbing reality) of rape. It's also a bit longer, at 700-plus pages, which is not so great for people like me who get sucked into Larsson's books to the point that we can't do anything else until we finish them. :)

61. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson

After a slow beginning (which may have been due more to my sporadic reading than the book itself), Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo turns into quite a page turner. I was up until 3 a.m. finishing it...although I'm usually up until around then anyway.

Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist, disgraced after being found guilty of libel, finds himself wooed by elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger. Vanger makes Blomkvist an offer he can't refuse: Spend a year researching Vanger's family, with the purpose of trying to learn the fate of Vanger's niece Harriet, who disappeared in 1966, for extremely lucrative pay, the chance to save the magazine Blomkvist helped found, and evidence that will ruin the man who sued him for libel. As Blomkvist begins to make headway on the old investigation, he hires punk hacker Lisbeth Salander as his research assistant. Together, they discover the Vanger family's dark secrets, which are far more horrifying and brutal than Henrik, or they, initially suspected.

Although the novel has been a runaway bestseller, I don't think it's for everyone. The characters inhabit a brutal world that includes serial murder, sadistic rape, and animal torture. Larsson writes of these horrors with a clinical detachment, and there's nothing gratuitous about the gore. Some of the characters emerge as admirable for their refusal to accept victimhood, regardless of what they experience. But some parts of the novel are still raw and difficult to read.*

I'm eager to read his next novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which I own, but I don't have money to buy the third in the trilogy yet. So I checked out the plots of both books on Wikipedia (I'm bad about that), and I'm still debating whether or not to wait until I can afford the last book before starting the middle one.

* I tend--and want--to think I have a pretty high tolerance for fictional violence, but that might not be true. I could only watch Pulp Fiction once. After reading Kiss the Girls, I swore off James Patterson forever, and I've also stopped reading Karin Slaughter. Maybe it's just certain types of explicit sexual violence that bother me, though, because I do like Cody McFadyen's books, and I've read nearly everything in print about the Black Dahlia murder. My own novel is quite violent, too; I had a lot of nightmares while I wrote it. So who knows?

42. "Tokyo Year Zero" by David Peace

David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero is hallucinatory, hypnotic, rhythmic, both repetitive and elliptical. Set in Tokyo in 1946, a year after the Japanese Emperor surrendered to the Allies, the novel and its characters occupy a liminal space: The living mingle with ghosts; past collides with present; the refrain No one is who they seem runs through the text. Tokyo has been bombed to rubble; atomic bombs have decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; war criminals reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, mobsters, and cops.

Against this backdrop, the narrator, Inspector Minami, finds himself on the trail of a serial killer who is raping and strangling young girls. Plagued by fleas, obsessed by his mistress and/or the murdered girls, haunted by memories of what he saw and did as a soldier in China, paced by the ticking of his watch, Minami struggles to identify skeletons of dead girls and connect them to a killer who knows too much about Minami's own secrets.

The climax seems rushed and a bit confusing as Minami surrenders to madness--madness possibly based in his genes, in wartime atrocities he committed, in the losses he sustained, in the crimes he's investigating, and/or in his conflict to keep track of his own disparate and often amoral identities. This is not an easy read, and Peace's approach requires some effort on the reader's part, but the result is well worth that effort.

37. "Outsider in Amsterdam" by Janwillem van de Wetering

Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering is the first in a series of police procedurals that take place in the city of the book's title. Written in 1975, the book carries some outdated language, but the characters are interesting and the plot resolution satisfying.

Van de Wetering's writing tends to be somewhat choppy, in a style I might describe as Hemingway-esque--not a lot of sentence variety. As a reader, I don't particularly enjoy this style, and it sometimes interferes with my attention to the story. But the setting, characters, and unusual elements of the novel make up for that.

34. "A Loyal Character Dancer" by Qiu Xiaolong

**Some spoilers follow.**

In A Loyal Character Dancer, Chief Inspector Chen Cao tackles a case with international implications. The title character, Wen Liping, has gone missing just as an attractive U.S. Marshal arrives in China to escort her to the United States. Wen's husband, Feng, was caught as an illegal immigrant in the U.S. and has agreed to testify against the human trafficker who organized his travel, but only if his wife is there by the time of the trial.

Chen is assigned to the marshal, Catherine Rohn, with instructions to entertain her, keep her safe, and investigate the case only as a secondary concern. He sends his colleague, Detective Yu, to the town where Wen and Feng lived but pursues his own inquiries in Shanghai. The investigation exposes him to political corruption, triad members, and suspicions about whether some of his own superiors have gang ties.

Wen emerges as a tragic character, the victim of international politics and a sense of justice that sacrifices one person's happiness to potentially save other lives. A photo of Wen as a teenager captures her in the loyal character dance, the only dance permitted by Chairman Mao--a beautiful, devoted Communist. She voluntarily traveled to the countryside for reeducation with the peasants, and within a year she was married to the much older Feng, with whom she soon had a child. Twenty years later, her son has died, she has no contact with her friends and family in Shanghai, and she continues to labor at a factory. As the investigation proceeds, Chen learns that Feng, who was head of the local Communist party, assigned the teenaged Wen an isolated room, which he was easily able to break into and rape her. After learning she was pregnant, he divorced his wife and married her. He continued to abuse her and blamed her when his political fortunes changed. After their son died, she again became pregnant. On learning she was expecting a boy, Feng decided to leave for the United States. His demand to the American authorities that his wife join him reflects no concern for her, but rather interest in the son she is carrying.

Complicating the investigation and the choice Wen must make is the interest various triad gangs have taken in the case. If she decides to remain in China--with the result that Feng refuses to testify--the police can't offer her protection against gangsters who are searching for her and want her dead. Chen himself struggles with the conflicts between his conscience, his sense of duty, and his political future.

Overall, this is a good but troubling read.

25. "A Rule Against Murder" by Louise Penny

Louise Penny's insightful cozies, featuring the wise and gentle Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, provide a glimpse into small-town life in Quebec, Canada. Unlike her previous novels, however, A Rule Against Murder takes place not in the village of Three Pines, but at the nearby, secluded Manoir Bellechasse.

Fans of the series will appreciate the chance to become better acquainted with the chief inspector's wife, Reine-Marie. The Gamaches are spending a week at the Manoir to celebrate their anniversary. Their fellow guests--a wealthy, elderly couple; four feuding, middle-aged children; two spouses; and an eccentric, ethereal grandchild--make for interesting and sometimes challenging company, until murder disrupts the vacation.

Penny doesn't keep close track of numbers, which can be annoying and contradictory. (Authors from Patricia Cornwell to Elizabeth Peters share this weakness.) The writing is sometimes so reflective as to become cumbersome, but the character studies are what makes the novel work. I missed Gamache and the rest of the cast as soon as I closed the book, and I'm eager for my next vicarious visit to Three Pines.

8. "Death of a Red Heroine" by Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong's debut mystery takes place in 1990, a year after the Tiananmen Square events and at a time when China was transitioning to a free-market economy. Death of a Red Heroine highlights tensions between the old guard of the Party, those who lost opportunities during Mao's Cultural Revolution, and those poised to benefit from the changes in China.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao has risen rapidly through the ranks of the Shanghai police department due to political connections. Yet he's also a man of integrity, dedicated to serving his people and doing his job to the best of his ability. The son of a professor, Chen wanted to pursue a PhD in literature, but the Communist regime had other plans for him. Finding professional success in a career he didn't choose, he struggles to balance his ongoing love of literature--he writes poetry and translates mysteries into Chinese--with his responsibilities as a police officer and Party member.

His first major case as a chief inspector, however, may prove to be his last. Chen and his assistant, the initially prickly but good-hearted Yu, investigate the body of a naked woman found in a canal. When they learn the woman's identity, the case rapidly assumes an unwelcome political dimension: She was Guan Hongying, known nationally as an ideal worker. Yet no one, not her colleagues or her neighbors, seemed to have a personal connection with her; apparently the role of national model worker subsumed her whole identity. Chen and Yu persist in their investigation, but when they find a suspect, the case becomes even more political; they learn that the proper, reserved Guan was having a secret affair with the son of a high Party official.

This novel isn't a whodunit, because the only suspect emerges quite early. Instead, it's a sometimes labyrinthine procedural fraught with backstabbing, political agendas, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, and complex interplays of power. Qiu, a professor of Chinese literature in the United States, intersperses classical Chinese poetry and references throughout the novel, always with explanations that aren't condescending but that offer valuable context and background for Western readers not familiar with Chinese traditions. (I say this as a Western reader not familiar with Chinese traditions; I appreciated the many poetic references, as well as the insights into Chinese culture, aesthetics, and values.)

Death of a Red Heroine does have its flaws; it becomes quite bogged down toward the end. Notwithstanding this, however, I thoroughly enjoyed it, not only for the cultural aspects but because I found myself missing the characters after I finished--always the mark of an excellent book. I look forward to reading more about Chen and Yu in other entries in this series.