![]() Mining the rich setting of colonial Malaysia, Choo wonderfully combines a Holmes-esque plot with Chinese lore. ![]() Mythical creatures, conversations with the dead, lucky numbers, Confucian virtues, and forbidden love provide the backdrop for Choo’s superb murder mystery. Ji enlists the help of her step-brother, Shin, to discover the origin of the finger, but uncanny tragedies and mishaps follow in their wake. Meanwhile, Ji Lin, a dressmaker’s apprentice who secretly works at a dance hall, happens upon a preserved finger in the possession of an unsavory customer. As Ren desperately searches Acton’s home and the nearby hospital for the finger, the body of a young woman is discovered, her scattered remains presumably the work of a man-eating tiger. Ren, we are told, is the Confucian Virtue of humanity and Yi, is that of righteousness. Thus Ren begins to work for William Acton, the British surgeon who amputated MacFarlane’s finger years before. The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo (Flatiron Books, February 2019) Choo integrates her plots by having her five characters named for the five Confucian Virtues, whose stories are yoked together by fate. The task must be completed within 49 days or else, according to lore, the doctor’s spirit is doomed to wander Earth forever. ![]() MacFarlane, to find his dismembered finger (it was amputated after an accident) and bury it in his grave. In 1930s Malaya, 11-year-old house servant Ren accepts the dying request of his master, Dr. Choo ( The Ghost Bride) centers her riveting latest on five individuals connected to a series of deaths in Malaysia’s Kinta Valley. ![]()
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