Dragon's Eye: A Chinese Noir

It's a case no homicide investigator in his right mind would want to handle—eight bodies mutilated beyond all recognition, shackled together and writhing with the tide in a bizarre choreography of death on the mudflats of the Huangpu River. No morgue will admit the corpses. The evidence is just too clear—the brutality of the killings, the scalpel-precision of the lacerations—there is little doubt that the Party is behind this. Impeded at every turn by bureaucratic obstacles, intimidation, and surveillance, Piao must fall back on his own resources to find those responsible for the murders—whose victims, he shortly finds, have no identities. He knows he should walk away from this case, to do otherwise is a violation of every survival instinct he possesses, but above the shouted warnings and veiled threats he hears the call of the dead to be avenged. And as a cog in the cadre system that rules modern China, a society whose darkest side is closed off to outsiders but all too apparent to its citizens, he's had to walk away from too many things, too many times.

Joined by Yaobang, his boisterously faithful and foul-mouthed deputy, and given a narrow mandate to proceed in his investigation by his chief, Piao discovers that one of the victims was a young American archaeologist, and he is soon joined in his investigation by the victim's mother, Barbara Hayes, a politician impelled to find her son's killer. With each new clue, a new dimension of the Chinese political system is cracked open, resulting in a vortex of conflicting leads traced to a heart-stopping climax.

Author Biography: Andy Oakes was born in 1952 and has a certificate in engineering and a degree in psychology. He worked as an engineer and professional photographer before training to be a youth counselor, and now works with young people, specializing in alcohol and substance abuse.

A poundingly paced thriller that evokes with razor-sharp detail the atmosphere of modern Shanghai's noodle shops, bars, prisons, back-alleys, and cultural spectacles, Dragon's Eye is a masterful debut that introduces a great modern detective, Chief Investigator Sun Piao.

It's a case no homicide investigator in his right mind would want to handle—eight bodies mutilated beyond all recognition, shackled together and writhing with the tide in a bizarre choreography of death on the mudflats of the Huangpu River. No morgue will admit the corpses. The evidence is just too clear—the brutality of the killings, the scalpel-precision of the lacerations—there is little doubt that the Party is behind this. Impeded at every turn by bureaucratic obstacles, intimidation, and surveillance, Piao must fall back on his own resources to find those responsible for the murders—whose victims, he shortly finds, have no identities. He knows he should walk away from this case, to do otherwise is a violation of every survival instinct he possesses, but above the shouted warnings and veiled threats he hears the call of the dead to be avenged. And as a cog in the cadre system that rules modern China, a society whose darkest side is closed off to outsiders but all too apparent to its citizens, he's had to walk away from too many things, too many times.

Joined by Yaobang, his boisterously faithful and foul-mouthed deputy, and given a narrow mandate to proceed in his investigation by his chief, Piao discovers that one of the victims was a young American archaeologist, and he is soon joined in his investigation by the victim's mother, Barbara Hayes, a politician impelled to find her son's killer. With each new clue, a new dimension of the Chinese political system is cracked open, resulting in a vortex of conflicting leads traced to a heart-stopping climax.

Author Biography: Andy Oakes was born in 1952 and has a certificate in engineering and a degree in psychology. He worked as an engineer and professional photographer before training to be a youth counselor, and now works with young people, specializing in alcohol and substance abuse.

Publishers Weekly

The most compelling character in Oakes's melancholy, evocative new conspiracy thriller is the present-day city of Shanghai itself: dark and decadent and pulsing with menacing energy, with a suggestion of the lawlessness of an Old West town or gangland metropolis. Appropriately, Oakes's hero is a righteous veteran police officer, jaded but grimly determined to fulfill his professional duty. Senior Homicide Investigator Sun Piao suspects a government coverup almost immediately in the murder of eight unidentified victims whose bodies wash up on a Huangpu riverbank near Shanghai's busiest street, the Bund. The eyes are missing from the corpses, which are shackled together. Piao is warned, in increasingly unsubtle ways, not to investigate this crime too vigorously, but of course his character (and the conventions of the genre) demand that he pursue the case to its conclusion, even at his own peril. He has a history of wrangling with his boss, choleric Chief Liping. In the United States, politician Barbara Hayes loses sleep over her inability to reach son Bobby, an archeology student in China. Frustrated with government stonewalling, she flies to Shanghai to get some answers. Meanwhile, Piao has identified three of the victims as Bobby Hayes, his pregnant girlfriend, and his professor/mentor. He later learns that the corpses lack vital organs, and that the other five victims are prison inmates still listed as incarcerated. Barbara and Piao turn out to be kindred souls; their offbeat investigative pairing and growing relationship form the heart of the novel. Oakes often seems more interested in showing the reader Shanghai than in explaining the nuances of the plot or delineating his supporting characters, but his rich prose retains interest until the protracted finale. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.