Hold Your Breath, China

April 1, 2020
A veteran Shanghai inspector monitors a potentially dangerous group of environmental activists while his sidekick matches wits with a serial killer. Though lately out of favor with the Communist Party, Chief Inspector Chen Cao is still the man to call when a serial killer is baffling Shanghai police. New victims are appearing every week. Chen is intrigued enough to take the case even though he's been assigned a much more complex task, one suited to his poetic soul. With the air pollution worsening in Shanghai, the government is worried about the increasing power of an attractive activist named Yuan Jing and particularly about the documentary film she is preparing. Comrade Secretary Zhao wants Chen to collect as much damaging information on her as he can. When Chen shares these new assignments with his partner, Detective Yu Guangming, they agree to split the two cases, Yu handling the murder probe and Chen digging into Yuan's world. Though forensic evidence indeed points to a serial killer, Yu can't figure out the common denominator among the victims or the motive for the murders. Chen's investigation prompts him to compose poetry with an environmental theme. As Yu aggressively assembles the evidence explaining the murders, he shares his progress with Chu, who succeeds in infiltrating Yuan Jing's group but has a hard time squaring his ethics with Zhao's desires. Inspector Chen's 10th mystery effectively uses the genre to explore China's current pollution crisis.

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Starred review from April 27, 2020
Qiu’s outstanding 10th novel featuring Chief Insp. Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau (after 2015’s Shanghai Redemption) finds Chen shelved for vigorously investigating corruption involving high-ranking Communist Party officials. But the capable Chen is soon back in action, along with his partner, Det. Yu Guangming, after the Special Case squad fails to make progress on a serial killer case; someone has murdered three people by shattering their skulls, apparently with a hammer. The victims share no obvious connections, and the Party Secretary himself requests Chen and Yu’s involvement. Chen is later pulled away from the case by the retired first secretary of the Party Central Discipline Committee, who wants him to spy on a group of antipollution activists bent on forcing the government to address China’s air quality. That the group’s leader is a woman Chen knows well complicates his task. Qiu’s execution matches his ambition. Fans of mysteries about honest cops working for compromised regimes won’t want to miss this one.

Starred review from May 1, 2020
The tenth Inspector Chen mystery again takes up Xiaolong's passionate concern with China's pressing environmental problems, especially that of air pollution (as seen in the author's previous powerhouse of an environmental mystery, Don't Cry, Tai Lake, 2012). As always in Inspector Chen mysteries, Chen and his associates in the Shanghai Police Bureau are fighting on two fronts: solving crimes and navigating the byzantine directives (many of them seeking to cover up crimes) of the Communist Party. This time, a party official pulls Chen off a case in which three victims have piled up, each with the strong probability of having died at the hands of a serial killer, and orders him to insinuate himself inside a group of environmental activists. Chen is torn by many concerns, including his own environmental sympathies, his felt need to preside over the serial-killer case, and his love for one of the activists (a woman encountered in Don't Cry, Tai Lake). Xiaolong gives us a fascinating two-pronged plot with two protagonists here: in addition to Chen, who must determine how to extricate himself from the grasp of the higher-ups, who are using him to bring about the downfall of the activists, there is Detective Guangming, who takes over the hunt for the serial killer. Xiaolong writes with both urgency and grace about modern China in another well-crafted mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)