The Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mysteries of New York City novelist S.J. Rozan are near the top of my list of favorite contemporary detective stories.
In eight books, starting with “China Trade” in 1995, Rozan found a simple but brilliant way of keeping a crime series fresh by alternating the point-of-view from book to book. Fans knew a “Lydia novel” would be followed by a “Bill novel,” moving from the young Chinese-American female detective Chin to her white (and older) partner Smith.
Although I’ve always been partial to the Lydia books — for their insider’s view of New York’s Chinatown — the series stayed sharp year after year because of the shifting perspective.
Rozan lives in downtown Manhattan and the events of 9/11 caused her to stop the series and to work on two stand-alones — “Absent Friends” and “In This Rain.”
“Absent Friends” is one of the best novels about the impact of the terrorist attack on the city, a big book (with mystery elements woven into the narrative) that earned Rozan new readers and some of the best reviews of her career.
I was a fan of both novels, but feared we might never seen Lydia and Bill again.
My good news today is that the two detectives are back in the just-published “The Shanghai Moon” (Minotaur Books) and it’s a fantastic combination of a contemporary Manhattan crime story with a look back at life in Shanghai just before and during World War II. The result is a book that should have broad appeal — a merging of the detective story and the historical novel.
The first two words in the novel — “I’m back” — have a double-meaning. A beloved fictional series resumes after a seven-year gap and Lydia has just returned to New York from California to face one of the toughest cases of her career. Lydia is estranged from Bill when she is hired by sixtysomething detective Joel Pilarsky to assist him in tracking down jewels that went missing after the war. The client is a woman who has made a personal cause out of finding and returning art work and other valuables that were taken by the Germans and the Japanese when Jews and other minorities were shipped off to concentration camps.
Lydia starts reading a cache of letters written by a girl named Rosalie Gilder who was sent from Europe to China — with her younger brother Paul — by her parents to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The parents never made it to China and died in the death camps.
As she searches for the Gilder family jewels — and a legendary (and possibly apocryphal) priceless brooch known as “The Shanghai Moon” — Lydia finds herself forming a strong emotional bond to Rosalie just from reading the young woman’s letters.
The device allows Rozan to create a wonderful parallel narrative of the search for the jewels in New York City and the events in Shanghai more than 60 years ago.
Despite the personal problems they had during their last case, Bill returns as Lydia’s partner (thanks in no small part to Chin’s best friend, Mary, who is a police detective specializing in Chinese cases) and we are off on a thrilling adventure that might remind you of the search for another fabled art object — the Maltese Falcon.
Rozan is in peak form, mixing personal drama, suspense and regular infusions of New York City gallows humor in a book most readers should finish very quickly.
