Amazon.com
Not many political thrillers are set in Tibet, and few can match the power and poetry of this debut novel by journalist Eliot Pattison. At the heart of the story is a forced labor camp where the Chinese imprison Buddhist monks and other local dissidents they've swept up since taking over Tibet. The prison also holds a few special Chinese prisoners--including Shan Tao Yun. This middle-aged man was once the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, specializing in fraud cases. For reasons even he doesn't understand, he has been imprisoned and brutalized, and now he spends his days breaking rocks high in the Himalayas on a road crew called the People's 404th Construction Brigade. Shan manages to survive under these harsh conditions thanks to the spiritual guidance of his fellow prisoners, but this precarious balance is threatened by the discovery of the headless body of a local Chinese official near a road construction site.
The dead man's head soon turns up in a famous shrine--a cave that contains the skulls of heroic monks. The shrewd Red Army colonel in charge of the district asks Shan to conduct an investigation: offers of better food and conditions combined with threats against his monk friends convinces him to take on the task. Colonel Tan wants a fast resolution that imcriminates a mute, passive monk found near the cave, but Shan is certain that the man isn't guilty. More likely killers include other high-ranking Chinese officials, as well as some American mining capitalists who had personal as well as financial dealings with the dead man.
By engaging his readers in a mass of details, Pattison makes us believe completely in Shan and his perilous situation--and creates a rare combination of excitement and enlightenment. --Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
A venerable plot deviceAthe discredited detective given one last chanceAis invested with stunning new life in this debut thriller from a veteran journalist who clearly knows his exotic territory. The gulags of Tibet, where the Chinese keep the Buddhist monks and other locals they've swept up since occupying the country, also house a few special Chinese prisoners. Shan Tao Yun, working as a laborer on a road crew called the People's 404th Construction Brigade high in the Himalayas, was once the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing before he was imprisoned for refusing Party membership. Now he struggles to survive his harsh new life, gaining spiritual sustenance from the monks in his brigade. The discovery of the headless body of a local official, wearing American clothes and carrying American cash, changes all that, as Shan is threatened and cajoled by the shrewd colonel in charge of the district into conducting an investigation. Col. Tan wants a quick and dirty job that implicates a monk found near the site, but Shan knows the man isn't guilty: more-likely culprits include other high-ranking Chinese and a pair of American mining entrepreneurs. To encourage Shan to come to a rapid resolution, Tan dangles the fate of the monks of the 404th before him, surrounding their barracks with brutal Public Security troops. Like Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko, Shan becomes our Don Quixote, an apolitical guide through a murky world of failed socialism. As his Sancho, Pattison has created another memorable character, an ambitious and conflicted young Tibetan called Yeshe, who can "sound like a monk one moment and a party functionary the next." Set against a background that is alternately bleak and blazingly beautiful, this is at once a top-notch thriller and a substantive look at Tibet under siege. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Sentenced to penal servitude in Tibet, Shan, a disgraced prosecutor, is assigned instead to complete a pro forma investigation of the gruesome murder of a Chinese official. The party line is that dissident Tibetan monks are to blame, but Shan quickly realizes that the truth lies in other directions. Working with Buddhist rituals, Shan shapes and discards theories to fit a range of facts, emotions, and spiritual beings. Set in the mountainous regions of Lhasa, this first novel is a stark and compelling saga of the conflict between disdainful and violent Chinese and nonviolent Tibetans trying to protect the vestiges of their faith. As in Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries, Pattison's characters venerate traditional beliefs, and mystical insight is a tool for finding murderers. Pattison writes with confident knowledge and spare, graceful prose. With Tibet so much in the news lately, all public libraries will have readers for this book. [Minotaur is St. Martin's new mystery imprint.AEd.]ABarbara Conaty, Library of Congres.-ABarbara Conaty, Library of Congress Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Good books take us places we can't reach without transport: a remote locale, an alien culture, another time, or into the heart and mind of a remarkable character. Pattison provides truly remarkable transport, setting the reader in a forced-labor brigade in contemporary Tibet. Most of the prisoners are Buddhist monks, stoically resisting starvation, torture, and psychological indoctrination by their Chinese captors. One prisoner, Shan, is Chinese; no one, including Colonel Tan, the brigade commander, knows what offense caused Shan to be sent to Tibet and slow, near-certain death. It is known, however, that Shan was a high-level investigator in Beijing who incurred the wrath of a cabinet minister and that no treatment is too harsh for him. But when a decapitated body is discovered by the laborers, Tan decides that he needs Shan's investigative skills to prepare a show trial and keep official Beijing from looking closely at his command. When the headless corpse is identified as a Chinese prosecutor, and the prisoners refuse to work until Buddhist rituals are performed to restore spiritual harmony, rising tensions threaten genocidal reprisals. It's a riveting story, but it's also a great deal more. Pattison's narrative is filled with ritual, portents, and even demons, and he somehow imbues the harsh Tibetan gulag with moments of eerie beauty and serenity. It's a trip. Thomas Gaughan
From Kirkus Reviews
Pattison debuts with this superb whodunit that leads an alienated Chinese detective to a cabal of hypocritical bureaucrats, meditating monks, and meddlesome Americans in contemporary Tibet. Serving an indefinite prison term in a Tibetan slave-labor camp for having embarrassed a high-ranking Party minister, former Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun is compelled by Colonel Tan, the fastidious Party boss of a remote county, to fabricate a report. The report will explain to Beijing the inexplicable murder of the local prosecutor, whose decapitated corpse was found buried near a road that must be completed before the American tourist season. The Buddhist monks in the camp, though, would rather be tortured or shot than work on a road where the prosecutor's ``hungry ghost'' is lurking, especially since they believe the murder was committed by Tamden, a supernatural demon bent on avenging Chinese persecution. Shan knows that failure to appease the Party's perverse sense of justice would make things only worse for the Tibetan people, whose religious faith he yearns to understand. Like Arkady Renko in Gorky Park, Shan finds that his effort to hide the truth paradoxically leads him to buried secrets within the Party hierarchy itselfsecrets hidden in ancient Tibetan caves in an American mining project whose naive scientists claim to want only what is best for Tibet. Alternately thwarted and helped by Yeshe, a brainwashed former monk, and by a cynical Chinese prison guard, Shan develops a marvelously complicated vision of an intricate, defiantly fatalistic nation inseparable from the beautifully bleak landscape that has shaped it. He also discovers a surprising dignity and compassion in some of his fellow Chinese, who remain enslaved to the venalities of leaders past and present. Breathlessly suspenseful tour of a dangerous and exotic landscape, where opposing forces, political and magical, give way to an eerie, mystical truth. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Superb...breathlessly suspenseful."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements."--Chicago Tribune
Review
"Superb...breathlessly suspenseful."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements."--Chicago Tribune
Book Description
The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending Beijing. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people's desperate fight for its sacred mountain and the Chinese regime's blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is innocent. Now time is running out for Shan to find the real killer...in an astonishing, emotionally charged story that will change the way you think about Tibet-- and freedom-- forever.
About the Author
Critical acclaim ranks The Skull Mantra with Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow as a novel as much about a people and a place-- the Tibetans of the high Himalayas-- as it is a gripping thriller. Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, author Eliot Pattison masterfully scales the heights of the genre, taking the readers to the top of the world while he chills us to the bone in ...The Skull Mantra.
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