A fire at Holborn station wipes out the electricity supply in the neighborhood and Joyce Peng is unable to access her apartment. In desperation, she turns to her ex-girlfriend, Tilly Wurman, to find a place to stay. Wurman is concerned by her former friend’s odd behavior and more so that she seems in no hurry to leave. Within days of finally returning to her apartment, Peng is found dead on her bed–a suspected suicide. Elsewhere in London, Catherine Roxborough has arrived home from a one year visit to India. A strange man appears at her window. Then she sees him again. Is he stalking her? And if so, why? These seemingly unconnected occurrences draw the attention of Chance Yang and Felipe Kazama, consultants for Mercury Investments and Securities, who arrive from the East to investigate.
A CHINESE REMEDY ((Mercenaries in Suits) is the first book in a new series from author Shawe Ruckus and it’s a thoroughly entertaining yarn packed with intrigue and a slightly off-kilter narrative style that adds an element of dream logic to an otherwise recognizably contemporary London landscape. The dialogue, most especially in the early scenes with Peng and Wurman reconnecting, is often strange, stilted and slightly disconcerting. Two distant friends with nothing much in common any more awkwardly dance around each other’s feelings. Later, the arrival of the investigators lends another slightly surreal twist. They are always believable and well drawn but seem strangely ill at ease in both their dialogue and actions.
Ruckus does interesting things with his text. It is often almost banal with localized British details: a conversation about wine from Tesco, ‘The Great British Bake Off’ playing on a TV set, a Union Jack doormat. Then the author will puncture this with the odd poetic flourish: a bouquet of white flowers discarded on a dustbin, a bird that suddenly dashes out from amongst a row of terracotta flowerpots and “heads for the moon”. And Ruckus has a winning turn of phrase, for example describing Kazama as having hair that “looked as if a dog had licked it.” It’s a very literate work mentioning Camus, John Barth and Lu Xun amongst others. And unusual for a mystery there is an index of some of the references at the end of the book. The most well read of the protagonists are the two investigators who make frequent mention of the James Bond novels. This though is no high-stakes spy drama. Not discounting the international intrigue that backgrounds the story, when the reveal comes it is more reminiscent of a cosy Agatha Christie whodunnit.
A CHINESE REMEDY (Mercenaries in Suits) by Shawe Ruckus is a promising and very well-written beginning for a new mystery series that introduces two eccentric investigators and manages to blend easily recognizable London life with slightly surreal twists of logic and incidence.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader