In his first detective novel, Tommy Tan successfully delivers a compelling, hard-boiled detective story written within the framework of alternate reality fiction.
Set in 1963, the story opens in a Taiwan controlled by a communist party exiled to the island after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Nationalist (KMT)-led government. Occupied and entangled in an ostensibly foreign political struggle, the Taiwan of this timeline too is under the heel of a White Terror regime. The harsh volatility of Communist rule in the book brings readily to mind China’s own Cultural Revolution. Tan, one of just a handful of relatively young writers able to fully grasp the linguistic and contextual textures of the real Cultural Revolution, seamlessly projects this cruel tragedy of history on Taiwan and successfully immerses readers in that dystopic world.
As the true nature and intentions of the story’s various main characters come gradually to light, suspicions intensify, making the truth even more difficult to discern. What is ostensibly a detective story thus takes on shades of a spy novel.