The Master Of Rain
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Thriller of the Year
Shanghai, 1926. A city of British Imperial civil servants, American gun-runners, Russian princesses and Chinese gangsters, where heroin is available on room service and everything is for sale. Exotic, sexually liberated and pulsing with life, it is a place and time where anything seems possible.
For Richard Field, it represents a brave new world away from the past he is trying to escape. Seconded to the police force, his first moment of active duty is a brutal crime scene. A young White Russian woman, Lena Orlov, lies spreadeagled on her bed, sadistically murdered. As he begins to peer through the glittering surface to the murky depths beneath, Field sees a world beyond the glamour of the city's expatriate life - a world where everything has its price, and where human life is merely another asset to barter.
The key to the investigation seems to be Lena's neighbour, Natasha Medvedev. But can Field trust someone for whom self-preservation is the only goal? And is it wise to fall in love when there is every sign that Natasha herself may be the next victim?
In a city where reality is a dangerous luxury, Field is driven into the darkness beyond the dazzle of society to a world where the basest of human needs are met and where the truth seems certain to be a fatal commodity . . .
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Praise for Tom Bradby:
‘Quite exceptional’ Daily Telegraph
‘Nigh on impossible to put down’ Time Out
‘Bradby has the talent of a reporter but the heart of a storyteller’ Daily Mail
‘Intrigue of the highest order … Atmospheric and richly entertaining’ Washington Post
‘This feisty, pacey thriller by TV news reporter turned writer Tom Bradby has it all’ Press Association
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A tinted review in adult Forecasts indicates a book that's of exceptional importance to our readers, but that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.THE MASTER OF RAINTom Bradby. Doubleday, $26 (448p) British TV newsman Bradby used his time in Hong Kong to do some research on 1920s-era Shanghai, the result of which is this hefty first novel of corruption, debauchery and decaying colonialism. Richard Field, a young policeman from Yorkshire, lands a job in the Special Branch of Shanghai's police department circa 1926. Honest but na ve, the Englishman falls into a snake pit of corruption and rivalry, revealed when a Russian prostitute is savagely murdered by a maniac. The trail leads to local gangster "Pockmark" Lu Huang, a powerful opium smuggler; when evidence begins disappearing and mysterious cash deposits are made to his bank account, Field knows the department is dirty, but can't get support from anyone except his sidekick Caprisi (a pugnacious American transplant who cut his teeth fighting Capone in Chicago). What's more, Field falls hard for the dead Russian's neighbor, Natasha Medvedev, who is one of "Lu's girls" and therefore, as Field discovers, highly likely to meet a fate similar to her neighbor's, which Field learns is only one in a string of such homicides. But when Field's investigation threatens Lu's opium ring, Lu lashes out at the foreign police force and the body count rises precipitously. The novel works better as a multilayered mystery than as a period piece, as the background historical issues are obscured by the more modern focus on frenzied sex and death. Likewise, the obvious film noir look the author goes for is undermined by the late 20th-century serial-killer shtick he injects into the plot. Despite the periodic glimpse of Western elitism and building Chinese sympathy for communism, there is remarkably little use of local color (language, food, local customs) to satisfy readers of historical thrillers, though the mystery plot doesn't disappoint. Major ad/promo; author tour.
