The Shanghai Moon by SJ Rozan

When S.J. Rozan first introduced private investigator Lydia Chin and her partner Bill Smith, in many ways she redefined the P.I. sub-genre. Rozan managed to stay true to the form while redrawing all the boundaries.

In this distinctly American construct, suddenly we had a lead investigator who was Chinese, a character with one foot fully assimilated into contemporary pop culture, while the other foot (clutched tightly by her Mother) was planted in her family, her heritage, and the deep roots running up and down the back alleys of New York's Chinatown.

An added twist on the familiar was the fact that our protagonist was a woman, her sidekick a man. There are precedents in crime fiction, but Rozan fully infused the voice of the characters --- and their genders --- into the narrative. You can feel it when Lydia is our guide, and the shift is visceral and immediate when Bill becomes our eyes and ears. Somehow these characters were more human, more real.

There are no stock characters to be found anywhere in these books, which is one of the reasons S.J. Rozan has garnered so many awards and has such loyal readers. I count myself as one of them, and like those readers, I've been waiting seven years for a new Lydia Chin and Bill Smith adventure. So when I heard The Shanghai Moon was on the horizon, I started counting the days.

Much as this series changed expectations for the genre, The Shanghai Moon redefines what we should expect from a series. In fact it blows the notion of a "series book" out of the water in a very important, fundamental way, just as Robert Crais' novel L.A. Requiem shattered conventional wisdom about point-of-view and narrative structure.

Once a series is established, there is typically a defined scope for the novels. There are close-in, claustrophobic investigations along the lines of Agatha Christie. Sweeping adventures in exotic locales --- you can choose your favorite blockbuster thriller as an example. Spenser novels usually take place in Boston, and even when they don't, the size of the investigation is on par with the rest of the novels. Elvis Cole moves around plenty, but he is ultimately an LA private eye, his stage limited by the types of crimes he is likely to investigate. There are lots of variations, but the scale of these series that we love to read --- the actual scope of the plot and ambition of the investigation --- is fairly consistent from one novel to the next.

Shanghai Moon changes all that. It is two things at once, a fusion of two styles of mystery that rarely occupy the same nightstand, let alone the same book.

On one hand it is a tightly written P.I. novel --- a fast-moving murder mystery triggered by a straightforward investigation that goes suddenly sideways. By our old standards, this alone would have made for a terrific book. Rozan's fans would have cheered and critics would have sung her praises.

But The Shanghai Moon is also an historical novel --- scratch that --- historical romance --- of such epic scope that it boggles the mind how Rozan researched this book, let alone managed to weave the two storylines together so seamlessly, never sacrificing pacing for detail but adding such texture to the characters that by the end you wouldn't be surprised to find them walking down the street right next to you.

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might go something like this:
This is The Maltese Falcon, contemporized, only with the actual backstory of the falcon instead of the shorthand history delivered in by Sydney Greenstreet to an impatient Humphrey Bogart. Both stories began in the past, driven forward by the obsessive desire to possess a precious object. But in The Shanghai Moon, we are there every step of the way, and we get to share in that desire --- actually feel it for ourselves, instead of just voyeuristically watching while others stop at nothing to posses it.

Lydia Chin is brought in on a case by her former mentor Joel Pilarsky, a deceptively simple investigation into some missing jewelry. Their client is a woman who specializes in recovering assets of Holocaust victims that were lost during World War II, returning the found valuables to surviving family members. Some antique jewelry has been discovered buried at a building site in Shanghai, not far from a district that once held thousands of Jewish refugees. When the investigation suddenly becomes much more dangerous and complicated, Lydia and her estranged partner Bill Smith must discover secrets of the jewelry's tragic past in order to solve the mystery they face in the present.

The modern investigation is vintage Lydia Chin, smart and fast, at times funny and always exceedingly human and real. But the glimpses Rozan provides into historic Shanghai are unforgettable. Parts of the story are told by letters written by one of the characters, a young refugee traveling to Shanghai with her brother, leaving her mother behind in Nazi-controlled Europe. As she narrates her own journey the repercussions of the world war suddenly become incredibly poignant and personal, bringing a weight to history that is rarely felt in contemporary fiction.

Given the scope of this project one might suspect it would move at a different clip from Rozan's other Lydia Chin novels, but if anything it moves even faster, if that's possible. The juxtaposition of the two storylines has you turning the pages with double the impatience, and there is plenty of action and more than enough twists for those looking for a well-crafted mystery.

The Shanghai Moon is a book only S.J. Rozan could have written, and it was worth the wait.


This review first appeared in Reflections Of A Private Eye, the official publication of the Private Eye Writers of America.