Overview
Inspector Jian is a tough Chinese cop who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter takes him to the meanest streets he's ever faced -- in rural England.
Migrant worker Ding Ming is distressed -- his gang master is making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads, and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the Gold Mountain he was promised.
Two desperate men, lost in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a ruthless band of human traffickers in this breathtaking thriller.
Synopsis
Inspector Jian is a tough Chinese cop who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter takes him to the meanest streets he's ever faced -- in rural England.
Migrant worker Ding Ming is distressed -- his gang master is making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads, and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the Gold Mountain he was promised.
Two desperate men, lost in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a ruthless band of human traffickers in this breathtaking thriller.
The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson
…offbeat and delightful…Lewis's narrative is fast-moving and flawless. His story dances between the comedy of cultural confusion and the tragedy of broken lives and broken dreams…A number of exceptionally literate thrillers have arrived this year from abroad, including Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jonathan Barnes's The Somnambulist, Frank Tallis's Vienna Blood and Michael Cox's The Glass of Time. Lewis's Bad Traffic ranks with the best of them. It's said to be the first in a series about Inspector Jian. My advice is to get in on the ground floor.
Editorials
Patrick Anderson
…offbeat and delightful…Lewis's narrative is fast-moving and flawless. His story dances between the comedy of cultural confusion and the tragedy of broken lives and broken dreams…A number of exceptionally literate thrillers have arrived this year from abroad, including Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jonathan Barnes's The Somnambulist, Frank Tallis's Vienna Blood and Michael Cox's The Glass of Time. Lewis's Bad Traffic ranks with the best of them. It's said to be the first in a series about Inspector Jian. My advice is to get in on the ground floor.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
British author Lewis does a splendid job in this compelling thriller, his second novel (after Go), of dramatizing the challenges of strangers in a strange land. Inspector Ma Jian of the Chinese Public Security Bureau, whose wife died when the deeply flawed inspector was driving drunk, has let his only child, his daughter Wei Wei, attend Leeds University in England. When Jian receives a late-night phone call from a desperate-sounding Wei Wei that's interrupted, Jian travels to the U.K. At Leeds, Jian, who doesn't know English, learns that Wei Wei dropped out months before and her academic reports to him were lies. Eventually, he manages to ally himself with Ding Ming, an English-speaking illegal immigrant, whose wife was taken away by the human traffickers who got both of them to the U.K. A plot twist toward the end undermines the power of the book's earlier portions, but the corrupt and brutal Jian is an intriguing character many readers will want to see again. (Dec.)
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