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Inspector Lu Fei lives in a normally somnolent rural province in northern China. Even tracking down known smugglers of exotic animal parts, on the rise since the closing of local wet markets, is pretty much routine. Lu is doing his part by taking an afternoon surveillance shift at Raven Valley's Dung Hao market, where a known smuggler named Chen was seen recently on the CCTV cameras. Chen is wanted for peddling such exotic items as pangolin parts, tiger penises, and the like. Chen does show up and is captured, although not nearly as quietly as Lu would like. The next morning, when he gets to the station, there is a young woman (a girl, really) sitting in the lobby waiting for him. Her name is Tan Meirong and she is very worried about her older sister, Tan Meixiang, who has been missing for several days. The sisters normally communicate every day and she hasn't heard from Meixiang in four days. The last text she got didn't sound at all like Meixiang.
Meirong has a very active imagination and fears many variations on "the worst." She wants Lu to look for her sister. She is a persistent person; she shows up every morning and sits in the lobby of the police station, silently and not-so-silently nagging Lu to find Meixiang. Lu does what he can, and has little to no success. He goes above and beyond what is expected of him, sometimes with Meirong on his invitation and sometimes with her following him – even on a weekend vacation with Lu's love interest. Lu is not amused by this, understandably so. Fairly quickly, Lu discovers that there is more than minimal overlap between the clients of Chen and the missing Meixiang; she worked at a restaurant specializing in legal aphrodisiacs and, not surprisingly, also the illegal exotics Chen supplied. This information leads him into an undercover operation in Myanmar, an operation which may or may not be legal and which puts Lu in serious physical danger.
This is Klingborg's second Lu Fei mystery; the first book, THIEF OF SOULS, got some very positive blurbs from writers of note. His portrayals of the vagaries inherent in living in even a remote province in contemporary China are interesting and convincing. His characters are believable and real. The descriptions of the illegal compound in Myanmar and its occupants are vivid and compelling. The assorted fight and torture scenes are also colorful and not comfortable to read. Believable but not pleasant. The story wanders very far from the original problem of a missing girl, not so far from the illegal trafficking aspect, and winds up with an ending that will be mostly satisfying for the reader, even if Lu Fei isn't totally happy about it. If Klingborg maintains the quality of writing exhibited in WILD PREY, this could be a very good series and, with luck, a long-running one.
§ P.J Coldren: I have been reading and reviewing mystery fiction for over a quarter of a century and read broadly within just about all genres and sub-genres. I live in Northern lower Michigan with my spousal unit, one large cat, and two fairly small dogs.
Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, May 2022
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