Hour of the Tigress by
Irene Lin- Chandler
hbk out January 99
Published by Headline
at £17.99
Hour of the Tigress is a thriller by Taiwanese author Irene Lin-Chandler. It features Holly-Jane Ho, an attractive, spunky Anglo-Chinese heroine. There’s plenty of action in various locations, mainly in London’s trendier areas or the Far East. The style is very contemporary, and so, I guess, is the overall feel. Readers who like conventional prose probably won’t like this book much. The dialogue is the same, which is fine for the more high-fashion characters but sounds odd in the mouths of policemen (and was far too full of untranslated Chinese and Filipino words for my taste. I felt I was being shown off to.) What I liked best were the Chinese-diaspora characters (I say ‘diaspora’ as there are few mainlanders: one of the significant things about this book is how its Taiwanese author looks west for material, not towards mainland China). I particularly liked Holly-Jane’s mother, a lady who leaps off the page as a real Chinese matriarch, spiky on the outside but remorselessly loyal to her own within…
(
Christopher West
- creator of Inspector Wang of the Beijing CID)
Hour of the Tigress by
Irene Lin- Chandler