It's 1990 in Shanghai and a beautiful woman's body is found in a remote canal, murdered. Chief Inspector Chen and his assistant investigate while navigating party politics. The victim was a "model worker" and it appears she had a relationship with a higher-up in the party, possibly the killer, so Chen and his team have to proceed carefully or risk their own careers. It was interesting to read about life in communist China - the housing shortage where many people lived in dorms or miniscule apartments with shared bathrooms and cooking stoves in hallways, relied on public phones and staff who deliver messages to entire buildings, and the system where people are assigned jobs and careers (or had spent time in reeducation camps). The story takes place after the cultural revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre during a time of change. The book is also fascinating for its descriptions of food (including things like eels and snakes). Chen is a poet at heart and the book is interspersed with lines from classical Chinese verse. The book proceeds slowly but kept my interest throughout.

2020 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge-a book that takes place in a country that begins with the letter C (China).

This is not really a mystery as we know who the murderer is fairly early on in the book. Instead it's a ride through Chinese culture, politics, history, and literature while the detectives try to gather evidence while dodging party leaders.

It was great to read the beginning of this series. I am so excited to watch where Qui takes this - I love how he combines mystery with culture in China - including extensive commentary and past culture and how things are changing in China. Yet even though these novels are set in a very foriegn country Qui does an excellent job translating this culture for the western reader and talking about the tensions between east and west as well as old and new.

Really good crime novel -works both as a procedural novel following Inspector Chen and his poetic leanings solving a murder case in 1990s Shanghai, but also it offers a fascinating insight into just post-Tiananmen Square China struggling to move into the modern world whilst keeping hold of its Communist identity.

This is too long and too slow for me. I rather like the detectives, but I don't like the relationship Chen has with Wang (journalist and love interest). There's a lot about contemporary Chinese society, which I want to be more interested in than I actually am.