Sunday, August 5, 2012

MIDNIGHT IN PEKING by Paul French (non-fic)

It is 1937 in the Imperial City of Peking.  It is a city of louche westerners living out the last days of the empire, a diplomatic outpost, a city of poor White Russian refugees, and a city about to be invaded by the Japanese. Peking, rife with opium dens, widespread depravity, and the Forbidden City hidden behind thick walls, is dying itself.   One winter night an English school girl named Pamela Werner goes missing, and her horribly mutilated body is discovered beneath the Fox Gate on the edge of the badlands.   Why she was there and how she met her fated end is a mystery that two detectives, one English and one Chinese set out to solve.  As Japanese troops tighten their hold on the city, the detectives are bound by time to discover what person, or persons would commit such a monstrous crime.
The historian Paul French, an expert on Chinese history, keeps the reader enthralled as the story unfolds.  He makes this story interesting much as the writer Eric Larson does in his books.  From his research, he discovers the true story of Pamela Werner's tragic young life, and solves the mystery at the heart of the murder, answers which have lay hidden and forgotten until modern day. This is a story that is as interesting and frightening as any fictional mystery story, only it is true and doubly horrifying for being so.  Recommended as a realistic picture of the final days of Peking before the rise of the communist state.

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