Do you want to know even more about the Concord Public Library? Well good thing the library has a website. Visit it at onconcord.com/library.
The Shanghai Moon
S.J. Rozan
2009, 373 pages
Setting: New York City present and Shanghai 1938-1948
This is the ninth in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery series. This series was recommended to me several years ago, but I did not remember it until this new Rozan book crossed my path.
Lydia Chin is a Chinese-American PI living in Chinatown. Joel, a Jewish PI friend and mentor of hers, has a Swiss client who has asked his help in recovering some jewelry originally belonging to an Austrian Jewish family who fled to Shanghai in 1938. The client tells him the jewelry was recently discovered at an excavation site in Shanghai and then stolen. She thinks the robber will try to sell the jewelry to one of the many jewelers in Chinatown. Joel asks Lydia for her help looking for leads in Chinatown and two days later he is killed. Of course Lydia must continue with the case, even after she is fired, because she is sure that it will lead to Joel’s killer. With Joel out of the picture, Bill Smith returns to Lydia’s side to help her find the jewelry and Joel’s killer.
I found the main characters engaging, the setting of Chinatown colorful and the back story of the refugees’ flight to Shanghai and the conditions there during the chaos of war and revolution very interesting. I plan to go back and read some more of the earlier Chin/Smith stories.
Ginny Babczak
Reference librarian
