In Midnight in Peking, Paul French (The Old Shanghai A-Z), takes readers to pre-Communist China, breaking the true crime mold in gripping detective noir style. As the sun rises after a bitterly cold Peking night in January 1937, a local man makes a chilling discovery. At the foot of a watchtower rumored to be the haunting ground of fox spirits, a young foreign woman lies murdered and mutilated, her organs cut out, her limbs and neck partially severed. Peking police predict difficulty identifying the victim due to the lacerations in her face until E.T.C. Werner, a former British diplomat, arrives on the scene and cries out the name of his only child: Pamela.
Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, head of the British Municipal Police in Tientsin and a former Scotland Yard man, is called to Peking to investigate the crime, but faces a string of dead ends and finds his hands tied as his superiors discourage him from investigating any leads that involve the foreign community.
Interweaving DCI Dennis's investigation with details of life in 1930s Peking, French takes the reader on a vivid tour of a community of aristocrats and con men, bureaucrats and pimps, a microcosm of propriety and barely concealed vice hovering on the brink of destruction. His careful attention to atmosphere, historical accuracy and character development evokes in the reader the same sympathy and frustration at thwarted justice that led him to write Pamela's story. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries