Spoilers follow.

Oh :( The last time I suffered as much while reading something was when I was reading "First against the wall". My favorite part of these books is the friendship of Shan and Lokesh, and to see that friendship disturbed was very painful to read. And that Shan decides to leave Gendun and Lokesh in the end makes a certain amount of sense but it saddens me.

Still, this book was good. And thinking about it, I have to admire Pattison for writing in such a way that you really seem to feel the same things Shan has to feel - when he is taken to a small village on a mountain to help solve a murder, suddenly his two friends Gendun and Lokesh are taken hostage by the head of the village who sees his safe position threatened by their arrival. And so for most of the book, Lokesh and especially Gendun are in horrible danger while Shan is trying to find out the truth and I found myself worrying about them most of the time.

I've written before about the many interesting and wonderful things about this series and the many reasons why I love it so much, but there is one thing I've forgotten so far: these are some of the few books I can think of that don't feature a romantic subplot of some sort, and it's refreshing to read. Or not to read, if you want. So often it seems to me that it's added because it's "expected", because "you need a little romance", but really, you don't. Not necessarily.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The mystery seems unnecessarily convoluted, and the final resolution is rapid and seems a bit facile. I loved the first of these books and some of the others, but it will be a while before I will tackle another.
This one felt depressing in a way that the others did not, despite the ending, which I found unsatisfying as I said.

I had read two of the previous books but found this one hard going initially. The first 45 pages drag but then the plot takes off. Shan is the man and the idea of linking Tibet and the Navajo Nation was intriguing, however, the shaman stuff gets a little perplexing and boring at times.

This book is a platonic Chinese love story disguised as a Tibetan/Navajo murder mystery, which manages to make excellent social and world commentary while being a rivetting story.

"you live in a fairy world" -how many times have I heard this (in 4 languages)! Now, I feel vindicated. And yes, the cost is high, but in the end, worth it.
ShiraDestinie
Today's 'normal' date is: Sun Nov 02 2014
Today's U.N. Date is: Thursday, November 2. 12014 H.E. (Holocene Era)
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Este libro es la historia de un amor sin sexo de dos Chinos, disfrazado como misterio de matanza Tibetano/Navajo, lo cual logra a hacer excelentes comentarios sociales mientras siendo una historia imnensa.

"vives en un mundo de hadas" -cuantas veces he oido eso (en 4 idiomas)!
Ahora, me siento absolvado (Vindicado?). Y si, cuesta mucho, pero en fin, lo vale.
ShiraDestinie
fecha de hoy : Domingo, 2 Nov. 2014
fecha Universal: Jueves, 2 Noviembre, 12014 e.H. (era Holocéno)

"Omit needless words," wrote William Strunk Jr. in The Elements of Style. It is a dictum that Eliot Pattison could profit by following. He seems to suffer from diarrhea of the pen or word processor. Words pour forth in great profusion, often repetitively and to very little effect. The words do not really seem to advance the narrative or provide enlightenment. They simply occupy space on the page. One would think that Pattison is being paid by the word.

Not only is he overly wordy but Pattison has certain writing tics that get under my skin. For example, the repetition of the descriptive phrase "the old Tibetan." This appears on practically every page of the book and sometimes more than once on the page. We get it. There are no young lamas, but find an alternative way of describing them, for Buddha's sake!

What irritates me most about this series is that I really, REALLY want to like it. I keep picking up the next entry in the series every few months in the hope that the execution might finally live up to the promise. So far, disappointment has been my only reward.

In every book, the former Beijing inspector Shan and his two friends and companions, the monks Gendun and Lokesh, wander endlessly over the mountains and through the caves of Tibet where every rock seems to have been painted with a sacred symbol of some deity or demon. They are repeatedly caught and beaten and tortured, but they persevere, with Shan investigating murders which the authorities don't pursue or don't even know about. Those ever-present deities and/or demons will somehow prove to be involved and, in the end, Shan will reveal all in a meandering narrative.

Oh, and also, there will be an American in the mix. The plots are really very predictable.

In this entry, Shan is summoned to a remote village (apparently, all villages in Tibet are remote) where a comatose man was found with two dead bodies. The headman of the village drew the conclusion that this man was the murderer and now they are waiting for him to wake up so they can execute him.

Almost immediately, Shan intuits that something is unusual about this man, but it is only when he finally wakes up that he is able to determine that the man, in fact, is not Tibetan but Navajo. He was in Tibet with his niece, a researcher investigating ancestral ties between the Navajo people and the Bon, ancient ancestors of the people of Tibet. She was seeking to prove that they were two branches of the same stream. Now she has disappeared and her uncle is seriously injured and accused of murder.

Shan sets out to discover what really happened on the mountain where the murders occurred and the Navajo man was injured. He quickly learns that these were not the first murders in the area. Indeed, there has been a pattern of murders here in recent years with the most curious feature of the crimes being that the hands of the victims are being removed by the murderer.

Shan's investigation reveals a tangled web of relationships between the unmapped mountain village, illegal gold miners, and, as always, corrupt officials in Lhasa and Beijing. How he puts all of this together to arrive at a solution to the murders and to again save Gendun and Lokesh involves lots of wandering and finally solving the riddle of Dragon Mountain, the place "where the world begins" in thunder and lightning.

By the last couple of chapters, I had lost interest and was scanning the pages pretty quickly, but I doubt that I missed anything truly significant.

I love the whole series. It was my first intro to Tibetan Buddhism.

I love the whole series. It was my first intro to Tibetan Buddhism.

Wow! This is a book that swept me up. It's the first I've read in the series, and I'm almost afraid to read the others, because this was so good.

Mystery, set in the high mountains of Tibet (so a lovely summer read that takes you out of the heat), with criss-crossing plot involving ancient wisdom and modern greed.

Rich portrait of ancient Tibetan culture set against communist China law with a murder mystery and noir vibe in a remote mountain setting.