The Eye of Jade

Private detectives are banned in China but Mei Wang, who once had a stable job in the Ministry of Public Security thought that there was a need for the services she could provide. In Beijing there many small crimes that the police will not involve themselves with and in the new millennium divorce is becoming more common place so Mei could find independence as a business woman. All she had to do was market herself as an Information Consultant.

One of Mei Wang's earliest memories is of her life in a labor camp with her father who was an intellectual condemned for his idealism to hard labor for the rest of his life. One day her mother came and got her and bore her away on a bus while she waved goodbye to her father, not realizing that she would never see him again.



Then she lived a hard scrabble life with her mother Ling Bai who struggled to put food on the table for Mei and her younger sister Lu. After the end of the Cultural Revolution Ling Bai was able to get a permanent job and the family's situation improved..  Mei Wang went to University after which she got a job and an apartment that went with it  at the Ministry of Public Security, a higher echelon of the police department akin to Scotland Yard.

She became disillusioned with her work at the MPS and left their although her family was aghast at her decision to leave the security off a government job and all the perks that went with it. Her mother's position was that she was throwing away her future because what mattered in China was not money but power. None the less  Mei liked her independence and she determined not to brood about the past.

One day a Mr. Chen Jitian made an appointment to see her. She knew him better as Uncle Chen a great friend of her mother over the years. He came to see her and told a story that began in the winter of 1968 when the country was being terrorized by the Red Guard. These roving bands of "patriots ' including homes, stores and even museums from which they destroyed the relics and burned everything by building great bonfires and feeding them with all the artwork, documents and records.

Now, in the present some of these artifacts are surfacing, in particular an ancient ceremonial bowl. It appears that someone had stolen some things before everything was destroyed.  Now the bowl had been sold to an antique dealer. Uncle Chen is looking for a jade seal  belonging to a long ago Chinese ruler that he thinks was taken from a museum at the same time as the bowl. He asks Mei to find it for him.

The first thing Mei does is find search for the person who sold the bowl, but when she finds him he has  just been murdered. Interestingly, although she has discovered a dead body she is never interviewed by the authorities. But now the game is afoot and Mei backtracks through recent history to find the connections that will lead her to the stolen artifacts as well as to a new understanding of her own past. The era of the cultural revolution was filled with death, destruction and secrets.

Mei is very enterprising and energetic as she pursues the Jade object through the years but she is very conflicted about what she also discovers about her own past life. It takes an illness in a loved one for her to try to reconnect some of the fractured pictures of what really happened to her family.
This is a very interesting book that is the start of a series and I recommend it to all who like stories with a backdrop of history and a fascinating locale.