Another Chinese Detective...

Those of you who were interested in Qiu Xiaolong's mysteries might also enjoy Eliot Pattison's novels The Skull Mantra, Bone Mountain, and Water Touching Stone which are excellent. A former Chinese investigator who looked too closely at situations he should have overlooked in Beijing has been exiled to a "gulag" in Tibet where he becomes influenced by the Buddhist Monks who are also imprisoned and condemned to a labor force. For Shan Tao Yun, watching the Buddhist monks leads to a search for a higher morality. These novels are long and involved, the characters are well-developed, the situations tense, sometimes horrifying, and based on the oppression of native peoples in Tibet as China attempts to eliminate cultural differences and religious beliefs.