Chinatown Beat

A detective returns to the Chinatown of his childhood in this "classic noir, filled with longing, violence, and that uniquely urban melancholy" (Richard Price).

After four years on the NYPD, Det. Jack Yu is transferred to the precinct of his childhood: Chinatown. Though he's the only officer on the beat who speaks Chinese, he's not entirely at home in the old neighborhood. His father is dead, his childhood friends are now gangsters, and the memory of his murdered blood brother is all too fresh. A secret society of organized smugglers and gamblers run half the precinct; vicious gangs rule the rest.

Assigned to catch a serial rapist, he's just getting used to the streets again when community leader and tong boss Uncle Four is gunned down. And his beautiful young mistress, just arrived from Hong Kong, goes missing. The 99% white, English-speaking force doesn't know where to begin, and it's up to Jack to plunge himself into the secretive, closed community of his youth—and come to terms with his painful past—as he searches for a killer lurking just beyond his grasp.

"Chang has a cool, measured style that lets in some light . . . on a society that lives by its own rules." —The New York Times Book Review

"For readers who relish noir suspense, it doesn't get much better than this stunning novel." —The Boston Globe

"All the expected locales are here—gambling and dance halls, brothels, secret societies—but the author, who grew up in Chinatown, keeps things fresh by inserting Chinese phrases and explicating cultural folkways on nearly every page . . . This is a nasty, terse slice of noir." —Washington Post Book World

"Chinatown Beat is a classic noir, filled with longing, violence, and that uniquely urban melancholy, but it also brings something new to the table, a loving specificity of a people and place, the multicultures of New York's Chinatown, that has rarely if ever been encountered in fiction before. A real discovery." —Richard Price, author of Lush Life, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year