(Drivebycuriosity) - Everyone has to be efficient and productive these days - even writers. It seems that when an author has an idea for a good novel he stretches it out and turns it into a series. Unfortunately the following volumes are seldom good.
This is also true for Qiu Xiaolong`s "Inspector Chen Cao" series. I enjoyed volume 1"Death of a Red Heroine" about a detective in Shanghai in the 1990s (my review ). I liked also Vol 2 & 3, but I gave up reading vol 4 "A Case of Two Cities" after about 50% ( amazon).
This book focuses in corruption in China in the 1990. The subject is not new and the author really inflates it. So it becomes tedious to read again and again about the bad behavior of so many politicians and bureaucrats. There is a lot about Chinese poetry which I found interesting in the first 2 vol. but also got tiresome and slowed the already tardy plot.
So reading Vol 1 - and maybe Vol 2 & 3 - is worth the time and the money, but not Vol. 4.
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