China Trade

Asian-American P.I. Lydia Chin is led into a baffling case of deception, murder, and gang war after being called in to investigate a not-so-simple theft from New York City's Chinatown Museum

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.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York private eye Lydia Chin gets no respect. Not from her mother, who wishes she'd settle down with a nice Chinese husband; not from her patronizing brother Tim, counsel to Chinatown Pride, whose museum has been robbed of two crates of porcelains; not from Trouble, the dai lo of the Golden Dragons, who tells her he's sublet the protection franchise for Chinatown Pride's corner to the Main Street Boys (but then why haven't the Boys demanded their monthly payoff?) and then kicks her into a pile of garbage; and certainly not from the police, especially when they find out that she's hooked up two homicides--a Golden Dragon who probably pulled off the theft and a porcelain expert at the uptown Kurtz Museum--to the missing pieces without letting them in on the secret. Despite her Chinatown contacts and the hard work she puts in with her sometime partner (and sometime romantic partner) Bill Smith, Lydia's consistently behind the curve: first she doesn't know she's being followed, and then she doesn't know why or by whom; she doesn't know that the dead Golden Dragon had a close connection to Chinatown Pride, or that the dai lo of the Main Street Boys has a close connection to her; and she has no idea how many times, by how many different thieves, those porcelains have been stolen. There are so many culprits, in fact, that you may feel you're reading an Oriental remake of Murder on the Orient Express. But Rozan's fast-moving first novel presents her Asian-American cast and their world with a delicacy that goes far beyond local color. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It's always exciting to read the first novel of a newcomer with a distinctive voice and the talent to put a new spin on an established genre. Such is the case with this page-turning mystery introducing Lydia Chin, a Chinese American private investigator living in New York City's Chinatown. When the Chinatown Museum is robbed of a set of rare porcelains, the chair of the board of directors calls in her friend Lydia, despite the opposition of Lydia's brother, Tim, a board member embarrassed by his sister's occupation (not suitable for a respectable Chinese woman) and afraid that her failure to solve the crime will make him lose face. Working with her sometime partner Bill Smith, Lydia finds a connection between the shadowy underworld of the tongs (Chinese gangs) and the black market in stolen art, which leads in turn to violence and danger--definitely unsuitable surroundings in the eyes of Lydia's family. Rozan's Chinatown setting has the ring of authenticity, and Lydia is a true original. A very promising start to what shapes up as a top-flight series. Stuart Miller