Jan Wong

A Comrade Lost and Found
Amazingly enough, this book is set in roughly the same time frame as Eliot Pattison’s Tibetan mysteries (see The Skull Mantra). Wong, a Chinese-Canadian journalist, had been an avowed Maoist in the ‘70s and was the first Westerner to attend Beijing University. She returns to China with her sons and husband to find a woman she turned in to the authorities while at University, to try to make amends. As she goes about her “mission impossible,” we see contemporary China through her eyes – one who believed in the revolution, and who now wonders what it was all about.
–DB/Reference Emerita

Eliot Pattison

The Skull Mantra
This first book of the “Shan Tao Yun” mysteries introduces a Chinese Inspector who, after pursuing justice too far in his zeal to root out corruption in Beijing, ends up in a gulag in Tibet, where he befriends and is influenced by his fellow prisoners, many of whom are Buddhist monks. A heinous murder causes the authorities to call upon his expertise both in criminology and in his newfound understanding of Tibetan historical, cultural and religious practices. The continuing series gives an excellent insight into the Chinese/Tibetan political situation, a very current problem.
–DB/Reference Emerita

Dee Henderson

The Protector
“The fourth in the O’Malley series introduces the reader to Kate O’Malley, a hostage negotiator who is in need of protection. Each book in the series features one of the seven O’Malley siblings who met in an orphanage in their teens and made the choice to become a committed family by all taking the same last name.”
–KD/Highland

Lynn Austin

A Woman’s Place
“This compelling story of four very different women who meet and become fast friends while working at an airplane factory in Michigan during World War II is a great book discussion title for its themes of gender roles, racism and forgiveness.”
–KD/Highland