Not really much to say about this one. It's a sequel, but it feels more like a remake of the previous book as it follows the two leads, Smith & Petrie, getting into all sorts of scrapes with Fu Manchu. Lots of aimless galavanting, their confidant dies unexpectedly - thanks to you know who, Petrie falls in love with the exotic Arabic woman (again), and the ending is left ambiguous whether it really is the end for our Oriental criminal mastermind. *SPOILER*



(and Sax Rohmer just cranked them out right until the end) Insert footage of Rohmer during a rant - I won't get into specifics but you probably have some sort of idea.



Despite this I actually enjoyed it more than the first one, which kind of dragged, but I'd still hesitate to call it good. Rohmer's turgid prose and melodromatic descriptions do nothing to draw out the characters and what makes them tick (and this is coming from a person that's read countless stories of H.P Lovecraft), it simply presents them as bog standard caricatures of super sleuths who go on crazy adventures. The setpieces are well executed but the story feels like it's not amounting to anything, which also bugged me in the previous book. Still it's an interesting relic from the past, albeit one that has lost much of its shine.