Ghost Hero by S.J. Rozan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"If you stir the water vigorously enough, [...] you can drag mud up from the bottom. In all that swirling, muddy water, a lot of things might be able to escape."
(Lydia Chin concocting a Chinese saying)

Ghost Hero (2011) is the eleventh book by S.J. Rozan that I am reviewing on Goodreads. Certainly not among the better ones, although the historical background of the Tiananmen Square bloody events of 1989 gives the novel some weight and significance. I would rate the novel somewhere below the average for the author, far from the class of Stone Quarry or Winter and Night but luckily not as bad as the atrocious On the Line .

This is a Lydia Chin novel, which is a good thing because she makes a much more interesting protagonist than the amorphous and painfully clichéd Bill Smith. We meet Lydia as she talks to her client about new paintings of Chau Chun - known as Ghost Hero Chau - that have emerged in New York. Since it is believed that Mr. Chau was killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre the works must be fakes. Unless Mr. Chau is in fact alive.

The complications in the plot multiply fast. Mr. Chau's paintings were political in nature thus their sudden appearance may have been a result of some major political forces in action, possibly connected to anti-Chinese-government movement. Chinese gangs' involvement is another possibility. The plot complexity increases even more rapidly when Lydia learns that yet another private detective with Chinese roots, Jack Lee, is working the same case of Mr. Chau's paintings, but for a different client. And, ironically, while one client would love the paintings to be authentic, the other wants them to be fakes.

The setup of the novel is indeed very promising and the plot keeps the reader's attention up to quite late in the novel. There are too many twists towards the end, though, including a major one in the denouement. Ms Rozan seems to be following a clichéd template for a best-selling mystery novel: twist the plot so much that the reader is not able to see how implausible the whole thing becomes.

Yet again the reader has to suffer through the tired cliché of young genius hackers - Linus and Trella from On the Line appear again. I suspect that Ms. Rozan who is unfortunately rather close to my age is trying to pander to the "young adult audience," thus losing the mature readers. Even worse, though, we are served gross silliness when Mr. Smith affects a cheap Russian (Rooshin) accent, pretends to be Vladimir Oblomov, and manages to fool supposedly smart businessmen, or when Mr. Lee alters his appearance via make-up and ethnic clothing to impersonate an academic from the Central University at Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. So lame!

To be fair, I am happy to note that for once guns do not play a prominent role in the plot; alas the avalanche of twists and clichés almost completely cancels out the improvement.

Two and a half stars.




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