Ghost Hero
Publishers Weekly, starred review:
At the start of Edgar-winner Rozan’s excellent 11th novel featuring PI partners Lydia Chin and Bill Smith (after On the Line), Jeff Dunbar, a collector of contemporary Chinese art, hires Lydia to get to the bottom of beguiling rumors that new works by the late Chau Chun (aka Ghost Hero Chau) have somehow surfaced. Chau, who died 20 years earlier during the Tiananmen Square uprising, used traditional symbols and techniques to conceal subversive political messages in brush-and-ink scrolls. The likeliest explanation for the scuttlebutt is that someone has been forging his work. Bill hooks Lydia up with a friend and colleague, Jack Lee, who reveals that he’s gotten the identical assignment from a different client, NYU professor Bernard Yang. With doubts growing as to Dunbar’s real agenda, Lydia and Bill start fishing to find out what’s really going on. Engaging characters, crisp dialogue, intelligent storytelling, and a minimum of violence add up to another winner for Rozan. (Oct.)
Lee Child on Absent Friends: “Many years from now, when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It’s an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence.”
Robert Crais on Winter and Night: “Okay, listen up: This woman can write! With Winter and Night, SJ Rozan paints with the full palette of the human heart, using depth, detail, and nuance of character that I haven’t seen since Raymond Chandler. (Yes, I mean it.)”
The New York Times on A Bitter Feast: “Smart, crisp writing… remarkable sense of place… The rich sights, sounds, and textures of daily life in Chinatown are a sumptuous feast for jaded palates.”
The Detroit Free Press on No Colder Place: “Taut and beautifully written. Raymond Chandler’s spirit does hover over a book whose plot is twisty, whose characters often act with stupidity or hostility or both, whose dialogue is crisp and perfectly pitched, and whose pictures of New York in ‘the damp heat of July’ are ominously evocative.”
The Chicago Sun-Times on The Shanghai Moon: “It takes a gifted writer to create characters and stories this rich and touching, and Rozan has done it in spectacular fashion.”
Publisher’s Weekly on Concourse: “Rozan’s dense, credible plot cuts through all circles of its urban hell and is resolved with drama and realistic ambiguity. Rozan brings a distinctive, commanding voice to the genre.”
The Sun-Sentinel on On The Line: “Rozan keeps the level of suspense high and keeps the twists realistic as the story takes the characters from midtown Manhattan to tunnels and secret buildings in Chinatown. Rozan again proves that the private detective novel thrives in the 21st century.
Kirkus on In This Rain: “Social fabric so dense and so convincing that everyone in the Big Apple, from power-hungry politicos to money-hungry developers to survival-hungry street kids, comes alive. An exuberant celebration of the rainbow city in all its crime-drenched glory.”
Dennis Lehane on SJ Rozan: “Hands-down one of my favorite crime writers working today. SJ Rozan can write sentences that literally make my jaw drop. To read her is to experience the kind of pure pleasure that only a master can deliver.”