99 Ways to Die

Starred review from August 27, 2018
At the start of Lin’s stellar third Taipei Night Market novel (after 2016’s Incensed), Jing-nan Chen, who “makes the best skewers and stews in the Shilin Night Market,” receives a distress call from high school classmate Peggy Lee. Peggy’s wealthy businessman father, Tommy Lee Tong-ming, “who controlled some of the most powerful tax-dodging entities in Taiwan” and is also Jing-nan’s landlord in the market, has been brazenly kidnapped at a banquet. Since a police escort was present, the Taipei PD is desperate to keep their embarrassing security lapse private. Peggy asks Jing-nan to get involved after the kidnappers demand the design for a “power-efficient mobile chip” that they insist is in her father’s files, despite her ignorance of its existence. Jing-nan reluctantly agrees to reach out to a relative with underworld connections as well as to his girlfriend’s former lover, a tech executive imprisoned for bribery who might know the design’s location. Jing-nan has three days to come up with results before the kidnappers’ deadline expires. Lin effortlessly blends humor, plausible plot twists, and the politics and economics of contemporary Taiwan. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit.

October 1, 2018
A tearful telephone call from a former classmate asking for help gets Chen Jing-nan's attention. Especially since the caller is Peggy Lee, daughter of Tommy Lee, one of the wealthiest men in Taiwan (where he's popularly known as Tong-tong), who has been kidnapped along with one of his employees. Tong-tong also owns Taipei's Shilin Night Market, where Jing-nan runs his food stall, Unknown Pleasures. When the kidnappers ask not for a ransom but for the plan for a power-efficient memory chip, Jing-nan is tasked with requesting the plan from the man presumed to own it, imprisoned Ah-tien, the former sugar daddy of Jing-nan's girlfriend, Nancy. But Ah-tien won't talk until he gets a new trial; time is running out until Frankie, the oldest of Jing-nan's stall employees, makes a critical observation. Even when life is threatened, Lin displays a humorous touch in this third entry in the Taipei Night Market series as he comments on Taiwanese society, food, and immigration, an issue everywhere. Top-notch international crime fiction that will have readers dreaming of a visit to the Taipei market.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)