“On the night the young woman’s corpse is discovered, hollowed out like a birchbark canoe, Inspector Lu Fei sits alone in the Red Louts bar, determined to get gloriously drunk.”

Lu Fei has all the credentials of a top-notch Inspector and yet he is living in a small town in the north of China,where life isn’t very exciting. At least until the day a young woman is found dead, organs gone and something stuck in her mouth.

Such a high-profile murder is big news even in Beijing where the CID is taking over the case. The head of the CID has aspirations to be more than a cop and in China where there is so much political and economic instability, a murder of a girl isn’t top priority.

With little help from the CID, Fei will be digging into this bizarre case alone it looks like. There was so much going on here. Communist Party bigwigs, Corrupt politicians and business owners. China is very corrupt it seems.

But digging too far may leave the inspector in a lot of danger.

I liked the idea of this story more than the story.

NetGalley/ Pub Date: 04 May 2021 St. Martin’s/Minotaur