My Last Empress by Da Chen [Book Review]

My Last Empress by Da Chen [Book Review]

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Da Chen’s My Last Empress is a mixture of fable and reality, viewed through the imperfect perception of its characters rather than the crisp clear view of an omniscient narrator. While not perhaps the “hallucinatory realism” lauded by the Nobel Committee in their…

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Hagashino [Book Review]

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Hagashino [Book Review]

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The joy of reading detective fiction needn’t come from the crime—at least, not directly. The details of any crime, from the methods used by the criminal to his or her motivations, are often interchangeable between different detective stories. What an unsolved crime…

The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong [Book Review]

The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong [Book Review]

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The Mao Case, the latest book in Qiu Xiaolong’s series of crime novels, gives Inspector Chen, the poetry-quoting Shanghai detective, a new case to solve, involving capitalists, traditions and the meddling of the Communist Party. Once again, Qiu uses Chen’s…