The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Through the years that day has come back at times, unbidden, as terrible moments will. I've always thought every detail engraved on my memory so deeply that I'd never forget a single sight, a single sound. But when I look closely, to try to explain it to you, events appear jumbled and confused. Sounds evade my hearing, sights are inexplicable."

Coincidentally, I have read S. J. Rozan's Shanghai Moon (2009) immediately after Patrick Modiano's After the Circus . The beautifully written passage quoted in the epigraph that comes from Ms. Rozan's mystery/crime novel could equally well belong in the "serious" work of the 2014 literary Nobel Prize winner. Ms. Rozan's book is written extremely well and transcends the usual literary limitations of the crime fiction genre. For a long time into the novel I was sure the five-star rating is inevitable. But then what I attribute to some kind of Ms. Rozan's mental hang-up took over and for the ninth time in her nine books that I have read there is a shootout scene near the end of the story. I used to be angry about the atrocious endings but now I am furious at the author for defacing her own work. Guns should have no place in this wonderful novel: they cheapen it, make it look like a run-of-the-mill crime drama, instead of something very special, a gem that it could have very well been.

This is a Lydia Chin novel (Chin and Bill Smith alternate as protagonists). After their last case together (the great Winter and Night ) Bill has been estranged from Lydia. But now he is back thus allowing the incomparable "chemistry" between the two characters to return. The story is told in two separate time frames: the current (early 2000s) and the past, 1938 - 1946, in Shanghai, China. In the current time frame Lydia is hired by a PI friend of hers who is working for a Swiss attorney specializing in recovery of assets for families of Holocaust victims. The grandchildren of a Jewish woman, Rosalie, who in 1938 escaped the intensifying German persecution in Austria and fled to Shanghai are trying to recover a valuable piece of jewelry. Rosalie is believed to have carried the famed brooch called Shanghai Moon while fleeing Austria. Other jewelry items that once belonged to Rosalie have been found in Shanghai and it is suspected that the brooch might have been brought back to the States. Lydia is hired to conduct discreet investigations in the Chinese community in New York.

Events in the 1930s - 1940s time frame are portrayed mainly via Rosalie's letters to her mother that Lydia has found on the Jewish Museum website. We accompany 18-year-old Rosalie and her younger brother as they travel on an ocean liner to Shanghai and then the story follows their first months as refugees on Chinese soil while their host country has just been invaded by Japan. Later, the civil war in China erupts and the story gets even more dramatic.

Let's make things clear: the Lydia-Bill chemistry, and the current-time criminal intrigue are completely unimportant when compared to the truly masterful portrayal of war times in Shanghai. This is first-class literature and the wonderful prose conveys the sense of the time and place. To use Lydia's words from the novel: "I felt like I'd been in Shanghai, walking beside Rosalie, for weeks." I really did.

While I can fully understand why the book won two major literary awards I am still seething about the author using a gratuitous, stupid shootout scene. She spoils her own ambitious and otherwise very successful work. Yet regardless of how much I hate the author for her moronic act, this badly damaged work still deserves very high rating.

Four stars.

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