Comments (0)The Shanghai Moon
June 19, 2009S.J. Rozan
Minotaur Books 2009, 373 pages (hardcover), $24.95
The story of Shanghai as a refuge for Jews fleeing the Holocaust has gained considerable attention in the past few years, especially with the excellent documentary film, “Shanghai Ghetto.”
In her ninth Lydia Chin/Bill Smith detective novel, S.J. Rozan depicts that story from a very different perspective. Private investigator Chin has been hired by Alice Fairchild, a Zurich-based attorney specializing in recovery of Holocaust victims’ assets. Fairchild’s clients are relatives of Rosalie Gilder, an Austrian Jewish refugee who fled that country in 1938 and settled in Shanghai.
Seventy years later, some of the jewelry Gilder once owned has allegedly been stolen by a corrupt Chinese policeman who may be trying to sell it in New York. The search centers on that city’s Chinatown, Lydia Chin’s home turf, where she lives with her nosy mother.
Search for the jewelry eventually widens to the legendary Shanghai Moon, a much more valuable necklace that was supposedly created for Rosalie Gilder out of ancient jade and her mother’s diamonds during World War II. Did it ever really exist? Is it cursed? Is it in China or the U.S.?
The mystery encompasses not only the main characters and a Jewish detective, Chinese-American jewelers who emigrated from Shanghai, a Chinatown youth gang, Rosalie Gilder’s brother, a professor of Chinese history and several members of the New York Police Department, and Lydia’s best friend, May.
In some ways “The Shanghai Moon” is a typical detective novel, complete with a complex plot, wisecracking private eye banter and the inevitable conflicts between private investigators and police. Beyond the twists and turns of the case, the history (of the Holocaust as well as the Chinese civil war and revolution) raises this novel well above the norm. Numerous letters from Rosalie to her mother in Austria, whose arrival in Shanghai she desperately awaits, make this novel so much more engaging and profound than the standard thriller.
— Bob Jacobson