Dog Daze

Peter Rozovsky offers up another great piece for Detectives Beyond Borders, this one on Henry Chang’s Year of the Dog.
Henry Chang’s second novel for Soho Crime is all atmosphere -- meteorological, economic, social and human -- with plot strands gradually weaving their way into the story until one realizes that many of the details that constitute that atmosphere turn out to be plot elements.
Among other things, Rozovsky says:
For now, know that the novel's opening is worthy of any number of 1950s films noirs. So is the rest of the book, for that matter. The New York of The Naked City contained eight million stories; Year of the Dog makes a valiant run at that number, giving us protagonist Jack Yu, who can't keep away from his old Chinatown precinct, a dying bookie who comments wryly on his own romantic dreams, the hairdresser, cruelly exploited by human traffickers, who tries to help him.
I can’t wait to get my mitts on this one.

The full piece is here.

Comments

Peter Rozovsky said…
Thanks for the kind mention. Henry Chang's first novel, "Chinatown Beat," is on my TBR list now. He also has a story in the excellent second issue of Murdaland. It's a good story and for some of the same reasons that "Year of the Dog" works as a novel, but I think the kind of examination of a culture that Chang likes to do works better in the longer form.

He's also a jovial sort and yet another person I met at Bouchercon, but I had to stop with the Bouchercon mentions already.
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