2011 thriller, fourth of this ongoing series; translated from the
original German by Rachel Ward. The owner of a Chinese restaurant
hires Nea to get back a stolen videotape.
This all felt a bit flat to me. On one hand there's blackmail and
murder and the Triads and a high-priced but very ethical assassin; on
the other Nea feels her way through the early days of the new
relationship teased at the end of book 3. And this sort of
combination, by the same author and translator, has worked well
before.
But somehow Ellis doesn't seem to give them any spark. The tension in
the relationship feels more synthetic than it should; and none of the
Chinese participants in the crime plot is willing to tell Amelia
anything, in a way that feels like stereotyping. One of them is even
described as "inscrutable".
Possibly it was just my mood, but this never took off for me the way
the earlier books did. In particular I liked the twisty puzzles of the
first two books more than I enjoy Nea being exactly as awesome as the
plot demands at that particular moment.