Die Rote Klinge

On a wintry day in Beijing, the U.S. ambassador’s son is found dead, entombed in a frozen lake. A world away, in storm-churned waters off southern California, a dilapidated freighter is found adrift, its fetid hold crammed with hundreds of undocumented Chinese immigrants — the latest cargo in the Chinese mafia’s burgeoning smuggling trade. Among the luckless refugees lies the corpse of a “Red Prince” — a child of China’s political elite. The Chinese and U.S. governments both suspect that the deaths are linked and, in a rare move, join forces to solve the crime.U.S. District Attorney David Stark is sent to Beijing to work with Liu Hulan, a police detective whose disdain for the Chinese system is tolerated only because of her spectacular crime-solving skills. Their investigation takes them into every corner of today’s China — from glitzy karaoke bars, where government leaders and mafia kingpins make their most unsavory deals, to Beijing’s labyrinthine hutongs, where working-class Chinese have eked out their livings for centuries. Lisa See shows readers a glimpse of China as few have seen it before, a surpassingly strange nation, at once admirable and frightening.