Water touching stone /

Pattison's debut, The Skull Mantra (1999), won the Edgar Award, and his second continues the adventures of his smart, courageous, and spiritually inclined hero, Shan Tao Yun. Once a high-level Beijing investigator, Shan didn't tow the Communist line and consequently endured the horrors of the Tibetan gulag. He now devotes himself to helping the Tibetans in their seemingly impossible battle for justice under China's brutal occupation. As the curtain rises, Shan is traveling in the company of a lama and various members of the Tibetan resistance, including Jakli, a young Kazakh woman of great valor. They're investigating the death of a revered teacher, Lau, whose young students are also dying. Shan's perilous mission sends him across the world's most astonishing landscape as he holes up in the ruins of Karachuk (once a great Silk Road oasis), in secret Buddhist mountain caves, and in tents that could have been pitched 2,000 years ago but that now shelter portable computers. Things get really crazy when Shan meets a pair of American anthropologists risking their lives to prove that, contrary to the government's claims, the Chinese were not the first people to inhabit this mysterious land. Sandstorms, clandestine nuclear missile installations, and rumors of the reincarnation of a lama all figure into Pattison's remarkably complex, knowledgeable, and compelling tale, which both celebrates Tibet's marvels and decries its suffering. Donna Seaman

Few mystery sequels have been awaited with as much anticipation as this one, and in many ways this is a worthy successor to Pattison's first novel, the Edgar- winning The Skull Mantra (1999); it too is full of reverence for the beleaguered people of Tibet, especially its tortured and imprisoned Buddhist monks. "I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it," says Shan Tao Yun, a former high-ranking police investigator from Beijing who because he looked too deeply into some financial scandal was disgraced and imprisoned in a Tibetan gulag, where his life and his soul were saved by the monks who were his fellow prisoners. Released without official consent after his investigations into a murder exposed Chinese corruption, Shan has been living quietly among the monks, awaiting his chance to escape the country with the UN's help. Will he now risk his freedom to find out who killed a revered teacher and several wandering orphan boys? To Pattison's credit, he makes Shan's choice to roam across the wastes of northern Tibet in a virtually endless and dangerous search seem inevitable and totally believable even if some readers would rather see him in action on the streets of London or San Francisco. And Shan's companions are largely fascinating: a vast gallery of Kazakh resistance fighters, White Russian smugglers who ride camels along the old Silk Road and Chinese officials of varying degrees of nastiness. Finally, though, there are too many people, places, events and questions and pages to sustain the amazing energy of Pattison's initial creation. (June 2) Forecast: Given the critical success of The Skull Mantra, which is being released simultaneously in paperback, and continuing political controversy surrounding China, this book has real breakout potential. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Chinese ex-investigator Shan Tao Yun, who was introduced in the Edgar Award-winning The Skull Mantra, has come to the inhospitable terrain of western China to unravel the mysterious death of a popular teacher. Shan's team of allies, a remarkable array of Kazakhs, Tibetans, and others, quickly learn that the teacher's death masks others. Alas, the interference of tyrannical Chinese investigators, the hardships of the terrain, and the complexity of the interweaving plots slow Shan down despite his stunning psychological and political insights. The first half of the book moves at a meditative pace, but once the true quarry is identified, the hunt quickens and suspense mounts unbearably. As in the previous book, Shan mirrors the spirituality and peril of the Tibetan cause, while the addition of the Kazakh, Uighur, and other non-Buddhist indigenous elements makes this a compelling saga of vanishing peoples. The archaeological themes are but one of the ways Pattison demonstrates his power to evoke the desperate cataclysms that these tribes and individuals suffer. For all public libraries where the East lures readers. Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Pattison’s second whodunit, once again featuring former Chinese Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun, is longer, more complicated—and, alas, more repetitious than his Edgar Award-winning debut, The Skull Mantra (1999). Shan, just released from a slave labor camp and now studying Tibetan Buddhism in a secret monastery, complains at several points of being lost in the forbidding wilderness just north of the Indian border. The author offers this image as a metaphor for Shan’s agonizing quest to understand himself, his Chinese origins, and the terrible atrocities the Chinese government condones to break the back of the Tibetan people, but “lost” is also a regrettably apt description of how readers may feel as they try to navigate Pattison’s convoluted plot. Sent as part of a delegation of monks to solve the mystery of a Tibetan teacher’s murder at a distant capitalistic commune, Shan encounters a Khazakh couple carrying a dying child whom, they claim, was savagely butchered by a demon. Shan’s mentor, a monk named Gendun, disappears into the wilderness, leaving Shan to explore the strange relationships among the capitalist commune, a cruel political rehabilitation camp, a group of laptop-toting resistance fighters who call themselves the Maos, a cadre of lethal Chinese soldiers, and a vengeful female prosecutor seemingly intent on persecuting as many Tibetans she can find. More corpses, including a smuggler and other children, pile up as Pattison makes too frequent use of the device that made his debut thriller so marvelous: in the most desolate, lifeless places, Shan discovers hidden caverns, buried cities, a subterranean aqueduct, even an old guided-missile silo. The bulky passages are redeemed by moments of incredible beauty, as when the corpse of the murdered teacher is found inside an ice cavern limned by the handprints ancient and modern visitors. Awkward and unsure, but animated by Pattison’s fascinating overlay of Buddhist spirituality on the familiar whodunit formula.