China Trade

The setting of this entertaining mystery, New York's Chinatown, with its food, its smells, its street hoods, and its clan leaders, is not its only strength, but is certainly its greatest one. Beautiful PI Lydia Chin is hired to solve a theft of antique porcelains from a struggling Chinatown museum, a puzzle with pieces scattered all over New York. Christine Marshall is wonderful with the Chinese-American accents but considerably less strong with the inevitable others, and she has a tendency to place emphasis so oddly that you wonder if she is aware of what the sentences mean, or only of the individual words. This is not fatal to the fun to be had here, though. Lydia's implacable Chinese mother is alone worth the price of admission. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

October 3, 1994
Rozan's debut novel, focusing both on china, the porcelain, and on the homeland of many inhabitants of New York City's Chinatown, introduces likable Asian-American PI, Lydia Chin. Lydia, hired by the Chinatown Pride museum to recover stolen antique porcelains, confronts the leaders of rival Chinatown gangs in hopes of flushing out the robbers. With information gleaned from a meek scholar who habitually steals tiny porcelains from prominent collections, Lydia discovers an antiquities-laundering business that crosses all socioeconomic strata. Her sidekick, full-time sleuth Bill Smith, provides an element of sexual tension; the resolution hinges on a silly scheme in which Lydia sets herself up to be attacked by a hit man and rescued by her cooperative NYPD pals. Rozan shows a knack for characterizing Chinatown's denizens, apothecaries, shops and food, but her story has more flavor than substance.