Year
of the Dog
A
Jack Yu Mystery
Henry
Chang
Soho
Crime (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-56947-515-6 (1569475156)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-515-7 (9781569475157)
Publication Date: November 2008
List Price: $24.00
Synopsis (from the publisher): He’s been transferred to a different precinct, but Jack Yu cannot get away from Chinatown’s criminals—his old friends—who have hooked up with the Hong Kong-based triads in an elaborate nationwide credit card fraud, nor from the Chinese victims who cry out for justice, like the teenage Chinese take-out delivery boy brutally murdered in the projects.
Review:
Covering the period from late 1994 through early 1995, NYPD detective
Jack Yu faces a number of challenges, personal and professional, in Year of the Dog,
the second mystery in this series by Henry Chang.
This is a difficult book to classify. It is not a conventional mystery
by any standard definition and even the novel's subtitle, "A Detective
Jack Yu Investigation," is not altogether accurate as Jack doesn't
really investigate anything for much of the book, spending only a few
of the final pages trying to understand why a Chinese youth was
brutally killed and looking into the circumstances surrounding an
unrelated fatal gang shooting. To make matters more complicated, there
really isn't a standard plot with a defined beginning and conclusion.
Rather, Year
of the Dog is largely a
character study -- or maybe more accurately, a cultural study -- of two
men who happen to share a common heritage and, for the most part, a
common value system, but due to choices each has made, approach life
and living from vastly different perspectives.
Several, actually quite a few, characters drift in and out of the
story, some with more detailed descriptions of their lives than others,
but Jack Yu and Tat Louie ("Lucky"), once blood brothers, now on
opposite sides of the law, get the most attention. Both men are deeply
conflicted about many aspects of their lives and though in positions of
relative power (Jack a respected detective, Lucky the dailo, or head,
of the Ghost Legion, a Chinese criminal gang), both feel they're losing
the ability to control, or dictate, their respective destinies. The
parallels between them are remarkable yet each maintains a distinctive,
and quite separate, voice.
The narrative in Year of the Dog
is frequently mesmerizing, the author creating a dark and cold,
atmospheric environment, drawing the reader into the gritty streets of
New York City. But in the end something seems missing, or possibly just
incomplete. The questions asked, the situations presented, during the
course of the story do not have simple, neat answers, and sometimes
there isn't any resolution at all. But in many ways this mirrors
everyday life and that's undeniably part of the power and appeal of the
book. Year
of the Dog concludes with the
start of the Chinese New Year, celebrations that mark the end of the
year of the dog and welcome the year of pig, as if maybe a new year can
be a new beginning, a chance to make a difference during the subsequent
12 months, not only in one's own life, but in the lives of others.
Special thanks to Soho Press for providing an ARC of Year of the Dog for this review.
Review Copyright © 2008 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Have you read Year of the Dog? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series …
Chinatown
Beat
Soho Crime (Hardcover), April 2007
ISBN-10: 1-56947-437-0 (1569474370)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-437-2 (9781569474372)
Year of the Dog
Soho Crime (Hardcover), November 2008
ISBN-10: 1-56947-515-6 (1569475156)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-515-7 (9781569475157)
Omnimystery
keywords for Year of the Dog
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Location(s) referenced: New York City.
