Last Days in Shanghai

Starred review from September 8, 2014
If your opinion of Congress wasn’t already at rock bottom, it will be by the end of Walker’s shockingly plausible literary debut. Twenty-four-year-old Luke Slade has landed a plum job that’s turned him into a cynic: he is a legislative aide to California congressman Leonard Fillmore, whose ego (in contrast to his brain) is large enough to fill not only the Capitol, but also, he hopes, the White House. Leo’s richest backer funds a trip to China, where things go impossibly—and hilariously—wrong for Luke and his boss. Luke loses Leo following a night of drinking, and then gets mistaken for the Congressman. And worse, as the youthful “Congressman Fillmore,” Luke accidentally accepts a briefcase of bribe money intended to cement a business deal with a Chinese mayor, who is soon found dead. China’s no-holds-barred economy serves as the perfect setting for bringing these debauched and dishonest dregs of Congress out into the smoggy Chinese sunlight. As the situation veers out of his control, Luke’s rising panic transforms an outrageous tale of embezzlement into a rollicking moral drama.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
Slimy all-American graft oozes from beneath the economic aspirations of contemporary China in this witty, illuminating thriller.Walker's impressive debut novel is a post-millennial noir thriller in which the grubbier impulses of two superpowers intersect with life-altering results. Among the lives being altered is that of Luke Slade, a casually cynical young man condemned to endure ridicule and abuse from his boorish boss, U.S. Rep. Leonard Fillmore, R-Calif., alias "Leo the Lyin'," who's dragged him along on some vaguely defined weeklong mission to the People's Republic of China. On the second day, Luke loses the congressman, a professed born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic, in an all-night bender and must go in his stead to a rural province to discuss a major development deal. Somehow, Luke walks away from a meeting with the province's mayor with a briefcase full of American cash. Luke suspects he's been left "holding the bag" in more ways than one, and he frantically wanders from Beijing to Shanghai and back again trying to figure out what game he's unwittingly playing and who's pulling the strings. (It would also help if he could find his congressman, who's still missing in action.) As if all that weren't bad enough, Luke becomes the prime suspect in the murder of the mayor who dropped the bribe on him in the first place. The storyline grows murkier as Luke's week from hell gets worse. But as is often the case with quality American literary thrillers, what happens is ultimately less interesting than what's in the background; in this case, detailed and tautly rendered tours of both the smoggy physical landscape of 21st-century China and the even mistier psychological terrain of an aimless American forced to negotiate a clear path between risk and responsibility. Though its observations about China's construction boom and the dismal state of American politics are as fresh as the morning news feed, Walker's novel also feels like a disquieting peek deep into the coming decades of global economic upheaval.

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October 15, 2014
This edgy first novel delivers a scathing indictment of congressional politics as it follows a young aide on a business trip to China. At the beck and call of his boss, Congressman Leonard Fillmore, a petty man with presidential ambitions, Luke has quickly grown disillusioned and cynical. But things take a dangerous turn when the congressman, last seen drunk and ranting about his nonfunctional cell phone, goes missing. Luke steps in for him at a business meeting and is handed a suitcase full of cash by the mayor of a rural Chinese province who hopes to get in on a construction deal. Disoriented in Beijing's smogshine by too much alcohol, a bad case of insomnia, worries over the missing congressman, and the dealings of a corrupt businessman who is underwriting the trip, Luke is convinced something very bad is about to happen. Walker's smart writing on a host of issues, including China's frenzied construction boom, which has paved over ancient traditions block by block, and the sorry state of American politics, gives this cautionary tale frisson.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)