Dragon's Eye - Softcover

Oakes, Andy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033043196X ISBN 13: 9780330431965

Publisher: Penguin USA, 2005

Synopsis

Shanghai, The People's Republic of China. Eight bodies chained together and horribly mutilated are found in the mud of the Huangpu River. Sun Piao, a Senior Investigator with the Homicide Squad of the PSB, has drawn the short straw . . . the case stinks of Party and Security Service involvement. Wu, the Chief Medical Examiner, refuses to carry out the autopsies. No hospital will take the bodies in. And Comrade Officer Liping, Piao's head of department, knows things about the murders that he should not know. Piao should dump the case, he knows it; but to walk away from another politically difficult case goes against the grain. He has had to walk away from too many things, too many times. Privileged Shanghai society, the labyrinthine political system, the lowest depths of China's criminal world and its repressive penal institutions . . . Piao's quest brings him into intimate contact with all layers of Chinese society as he unravels its secrets.

About this title

About the Author

Andy Oakes was born in 1952 and is the son of a professional football player and an academic. After working as an engineer in the defence industry, he became a professional photographer, and eventually created a photographic retail franchise business. He then trained to be a Youth Counsellor. He now lives in East Sussex and works with young people, specialising in alcohol and substance abuse.

From Publishers Weekly

The most compelling character in Oakes's melancholy, evocative new conspiracy thriller is the present-day city of Shanghai itself: dark and decadent and pulsing with menacing energy, with a suggestion of the lawlessness of an Old West town or gangland metropolis. Appropriately, Oakes's hero is a righteous veteran police officer, jaded but grimly determined to fulfill his professional duty. Senior Homicide Investigator Sun Piao suspects a government coverup almost immediately in the murder of eight unidentified victims whose bodies wash up on a Huangpu riverbank near Shanghai's busiest street, the Bund. The eyes are missing from the corpses, which are shackled together. Piao is warned, in increasingly unsubtle ways, not to investigate this crime too vigorously, but of course his character (and the conventions of the genre) demand that he pursue the case to its conclusion, even at his own peril. He has a history of wrangling with his boss, choleric Chief Liping. In the United States, politician Barbara Hayes loses sleep over her inability to reach son Bobby, an archeology student in China. Frustrated with government stonewalling, she flies to Shanghai to get some answers. Meanwhile, Piao has identified three of the victims as Bobby Hayes, his pregnant girlfriend, and his professor/mentor. He later learns that the corpses lack vital organs, and that the other five victims are prison inmates still listed as incarcerated. Barbara and Piao turn out to be kindred souls; their offbeat investigative pairing and growing relationship form the heart of the novel. Oakes often seems more interested in showing the reader Shanghai than in explaining the nuances of the plot or delineating his supporting characters, but his rich prose retains interest until the protracted finale.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin USA
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 033043196X
• ISBN 13: 9780330431965
• Binding: Paperback