Chinese Whispers by
Peter May
hbk out January 04
Published by Hodder
at £18.99
This is another of Peter May's China thrillers, which intriguingly takes the
most well-known tale in the annals of murder and transplants it to modern
Beijing.
Li Yan, head of the capital's Serious Crime Squad, is faced with a couple of
horrific murders where the hooker victims are badly mutilated. By the third,
the penny (or fen) drops that these are a meticulously-accurate replay of the
Jack the Ripper killings in late nineteenth-century London. A book
describing the Whitechapel murders has just been published in a Chinese
translation and the hunt is on for a maniac who obviously fancies the
scenario.
However, the plot rapidly thickens, as it becomes clear that someone senior
in the police hierarchy is passing details of Li's investigation to the press and
the 'suits' in the Ministry of Public Security. Li Yan is a very westernised
guy who has spent time in Washington and has an American partner, a
beautiful forensic pathologist (aren't all fictional forensic pathologists these
days beautiful females? Wish they had been when I was in the business).
Another American guy, married to a beautiful ex-Beijing policewoman, is a
polygraph expert and invites another beautiful Chinese-American professor
to the Academy of Sciences to develope a brain-wave computer scanner as a
type of truth detector. She demonstrates this one day to Li and six of his
senior bureaucrats in the Ministry, but something about the result shakes her
up. Before she can divulge the anomaly, she becomes another Ripper victim
and later two more of the dramatis personae come to sticky ends. All this
consolidates into a vicious vendetta against Li Yan, with a tense finale -
though I was a little disappointed with the dénouement.
The story stretches credibility more than a little, but the description of
modern Beijing and its almost incredible transition from the city I used to
know into the present westernised metropolis, is beautifully written and very
evocative - almost sad, in its portrayal of the consumer-mad, burger-and-
Coke culture that has eroded old China in little more than decade. A good
read, especially fascinating for a former badge-carrying guest of the Ministry
of Public Security!
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Chinese Whispers by
Peter May
