The Firemaker - Hardcover

May, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312342942 ISBN 13: 9780312342944

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2005

Synopsis

Margaret Campbell, a Chicago forensic pathologist, has been invited by the Chinese government to teach at the Beijing police university. She has accepted the six-week assignment with misgivings but is desperate to escape a troubled life in America. Arriving in Beijing, she checks “nothing to declare” on the health declaration they gave her on the plane---nothing, that is, “except a broken heart and a wasted life, neither of which was contagious.”

She gets off to a bad start when her car knocks senior detective Li Yan off his bicycle. In a furious clash, he dresses her down in perfect English. But Li soon finds himself reintroduced to Margaret by his superiors when the newly promoted detective’s first case requires Margaret’s special expertise to identify a horribly burned corpse. Thrown together to track down the killer, Margaret and Li must bury their personal and cultural differences when they uncover a conspiracy that threatens not only their lives, but the lives of millions.

About this title

About the Author

Peter May has been a journalist and is the author of three major television series in Britain, one of them in Gaelic. With an extraordinary network of contacts, he has gained unprecedented access to the homicide and forensic science sections of the Beijing and Shanghai police forces. The Chinese Crime Writers’ Association named May an honorary member of their Beijing chapter, making him the only Westerner to receive this tribute. The Firemaker is the first in his China Thriller series featuring Margaret Campbell and Li Yan. May lives in France.

Reviews

This first novel in a series that has already includes six volumes in Britain, promises more fireworks than it delivers both as romance and as melodramatic murder mystery. The nascent romance between American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell, in Beijing to deliver a series of guest lectures, and Chinese police detective Li Yan seems more doubtful than hot-blooded as they resist their unlikely attraction. Margaret's expertise in autopsies of burn victims proves valuable, but the beautiful blond pathologist, seeking a respite from her painful past, is unmindful of her host country's customs and sensibilities almost to the point of caricature. The taciturn Li Yan, on his first assignment after promotion to Deputy Section Chief, is intent on his career and first new case: a series of three murders linked only by a single dubious clue. May is most convincing in his vivid depiction of a dynamic China recovering from the damage of the Cultural Revolution. Unfortunately, the plot is too flimsy for the weight he piles on and the overblown consequences lack credibility. An anticlimactic conclusion hints at further adventures.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Margaret Campbell, an American forensic pathologist, is doing a six-week lecture stint in Beijing. The last thing she expects, or is equipped to deal with, is a serial killer. Teaming up with a local police detective (with whom she had a seriously rocky start), Margaret gets a crash course in the many levels of Chinese society. This is the first installment of a series that has been very popular in Britain (six novels have been published), and it's easy to see why. Margaret Campbell is a well--crafted heroine, plain speaking and sharp witted, and her partner, Li Yan, possesses all the cultural graces and knowledge of Chinese society Margaret so sorely lacks. The author plays up the cultural differences and the odd-couple nature of their relationship, but he never gets too silly about it. It's a pleasure to be introduced to these two investigators, and readers will eagerly await the publication of further installments in the series. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Firemaker

CHAPTER 1

I

Monday Afternoon

The world tilted and the sun flashed back at her, reflected in a fractured mosaic like the pieces of a shattered mirror. Her body was telling her it was two in the morning and that she should be asleep. Her brain was informing her that it was mid-afternoon and that sleep was likely to be a distant prospect. Sleep. In twenty-one hours of travelling, it had successfully eluded her every attempt to embrace it. Although in these past weeks even sleep had provided no escape. She was not sure which was worse--the waking regrets and recriminations, or the restless nightmares. The gentle oblivion induced by the vodka tonics she had swallowed gratefully during the early hours of the flight had long since passed, leaving her with a dry mouth and a headache that swam somewhere just beyond consciousness. She glanced at the health declaration she had filled in earlier, still clutched in her hand ...

WELCOME TO CHINA FOR A BETTER & HEALTHIER TOMORROW

She had drawn a line through the space left for 'Content of Declaration'. She had nothing to declare, except for a broken heart and a wasted life--and neither of these, as far as she was aware, was infectious, contagious, or carried in the blood.

The world tilted again, and now she saw that the dazzling mosaic of light was in fact a pattern of water divided and subdivided into misshapen squaresand oblongs. The reflection of a culture five thousand years old. Green shoots of rice pushing up through the paddies to feed a billion hungry mouths. Beyond the haze, to the north, lay the dusty plains of the Gobi desert.

An air hostess walked through the cabin spraying disinfectant into the atmosphere from an aerosol. Chinese regulations, she told them. And the captain announced that they would be landing at Beijing Capital Airport in just under fifteen minutes. Ground temperature was a sticky 35 degrees. Centigrade. That was 96 degrees Fahrenheit for the uninitiated. One of countless differences she supposed she would have to get used to in the next six weeks. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the landing. Of all the means of escape she might have picked, why had she chosen to fly? She hated airplanes.

 

 

The overcrowded shuttle bus, filled with the odour of bodies that had not washed for more than twenty hours, lurched to a halt outside the terminal building and spilled its passengers into the simmering afternoon. She headed quickly indoors in search of air-conditioning. There was none. If anything, it was hotter inside, the air thick and unbreathable. She was assailed by the sights and sounds and smells of China. People everywhere, as if every flight of the day had arrived at once, passengers fighting for places in the long queues forming at lines of immigration desks. Even in this international transit hall, Margaret drew odd looks from strange oriental faces who regarded her as the strange face in their midst. And, indeed, she was. Curling fair hair held back from her face in clasps, and tumbling over her shoulders. Ivory pale skin and clear blue eyes. The contrast with the black-haired, dark-eyed uniformity of the Han Chinese could not have been starker. She felt her stress level rising and took a deep breath.

'Maggot Cambo! Maggot Cambo!' A shrill voice pierced the hubbub. She looked to see a square, uniformed woman of indeterminate middle age pushing brusquely through the advancing passengers holding aloft a piece of card with the name MAGRET CAMPELL scrawled upon it in clumsy capital letters. It took Margaret a moment to connect the name she saw, and the one being called out, with herself.

'Uh ... I think you might be looking for me,' she shouted above the noise, and thought how foolish that sounded. Of course they were looking for her.The square woman swivelled and glared at her through thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

'Doctah Maggot Cambo?'

'Margaret,' Margaret said. 'Campbell.'

'Okay, you gimme your passport.'

Margaret fumbled for the blue, eagle-crested passport in her bag, but hesitated in handing it over. 'And you are ... ?'

'Constable Li Li Peng.' She pronounced it Lily Ping. And she straightened her back, the better to display the senior constable's three stars on the epaulets of her khaki-green short-sleeve shirt. Her skipped green hat with its yellow braid and its gold, red and blue crest of the Ministry of Public Security was slightly too large and pushed the square cut of her fringe down over the tops of her glasses. 'Waiban has appointed me to look after you.'

'Waiban?'

'Foreign affairs office of your danwei.'

Margaret felt sure she should know these things. No doubt it would be there, somewhere, in all the briefing material they had given her. 'Danwei?'

Lily's irritation was ill concealed. 'Your work unit--at the university.'

'Oh. Right.' Margaret felt she had revealed too much ignorance already and handed over her passport.

Lily glanced at it briefly. 'Okay. I take care of immigration and we get your bags.'

 

 

A dark grey BMW stood idling just outside the door of the terminal building. The trunk lid swung up and a waif-like girl in uniform leapt out of the car to load Margaret's luggage. The two large cases were almost as big as she was, and she struggled to heave them off the trolley. Margaret moved to help her, but was quickly steered into the back seat by Lily. 'Driver get bags. You keep door shut for air-conditioning.' And to reinforce the point, she slammed the door firmly closed. Margaret breathed in the almost-chill air and sank back into the seat. Waves of fatigue washed over her. All she wanted now was her bed.

Lily slid into the front passenger seat. 'Okay, so now we go to headquarters Beijing Municipal Police to pick up Mistah Wade. He send apology for not being here to meet you, but he have business there. Then we go straight toPeople's University of Public Security and you meet Professah Jiang. Okay? And tonight we have banquet.' Margaret almost groaned. The prospect of bed receded into some distant, misty future. That much-quoted line from Frost's poem came back to her ... 'and miles to go before I sleep'. Then she frowned, replaying Lily's words. Did she say banquet?

 

 

The BMW sped along the airport expressway, bypassing the toll gates and quickly reaching the outskirts of the city. Margaret watched with amazement through the darkened side windows as the city rose up around her. Towering office blocks, new hotels, trade centres, upscale apartments. Everywhere the traditional single-storey tile-roofed siheyuan courtyards in the narrow hutongs were being demolished to make way for the transition from 'developing' country to 'first world' status. Whatever Margaret had expected--and she was not certain what her expectations had been--it had not been this. The only thing 'Chinese' that she could see in any of it were the ornamental curled eaves grafted on to the tops of skyscrapers. Long gone the huge character posters urging comrades to greater effort on behalf of the motherland. In their place gigantic adverts for Sharp, Fuji, Volvo. Capitalism was the spur now. They passed a McDonald's burger joint, a blur of red and yellow. Her preconceptions of streets thick with cyclists all uniformly dressed in Mao pyjamas were blown away in the clouds of carbon monoxide issuing from the buses, trucks, taxis and private cars that choked the six lanes of the Third Ring Road as it swept round the eastern fringes of the city. Just like Chicago, she thought. Very 'first world'. Except for the bicycle lanes.

The driver hugged the outside lane as they approached the city centre past the Beijing Hotel and Wangfujing Street. In the distance Margaret could see the ornate towering gate of the Forbidden City, with its huge portrait of Mao gazing down on Tiananmen Square. Heaven's Gate. It was the backdrop, it seemed, to every CNN report from Beijing. A giant cliche of China. Margaret recalled seeing the pictures on TV of Mao's portrait defaced with red paint by the democracy demonstrators in the square in '89. A student herself then, still at medical school, she had been shocked and outraged by the bloody events of that spring. And now here she was, a decade on. She wondered how much things had changed. Or even if they had.

Their car took a sudden left, to the accompaniment of a chorus of horns, and they slipped unexpectedly into a leafy side street with gardens down its centre and locust trees on either side forming a shady canopy. Here they might have been in the old quarter of any European city, elegant Victorian and colonial buildings on either side. Lily half turned, pointing to a high wall on their right.

'Ministry of Public Security in there. Used to be British embassy compound before Chinese government threw them out. This old legation area.'

Further down, past some older apartment blocks that didn't look remotely European, they took another left into Dong Jiaominxiang Lane, a narrower street where the light was almost completely obscured by overhanging trees. A couple of bicycle repairmen had set up shop on the sidewalk, making the most of the shade. Cars and bicycles crowded the road. On their right, a gateway opened on to a vast modern white building at the top of a sweep of steps guarded by two lions. High above the entrance hung a huge red-and-gold crest. 'China Supreme Court,' Lily said, and Margaret barely had time to look before the car swung left and squealed to a sudden halt. There was a bump and a clatter. Their driver threw her hands in the air with a gasp of incredulity and jumped out of the car.

Margaret craned forward to see what was happening. They had been in the act of turning through an arched gateway into a spra...

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312342942
• ISBN 13: 9780312342944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368