Bone Mountain (Inspector Shan, #3) By Eliot Pattison


When disgraced former inspector Shan Tao Yun joins a group of reverent Tibetans returning a sacred artefact to its home, it seems he has at last found the peace he has struggled for since leaving prison. But when one of the group is murdered, Shan discovers that the artefact has been stolen from the Chinese army. Paperback

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Bettie's Books Paperback Too long, too depressing. The first book was amazing, the second book had the added interesting element of the Uighur struggle, but here was just have the same tropes: the Tibetans have had a miserable past, are miserable now, and have nothing to look forward to in the future. If anything, they're delusional, holding mantra sessions against tanks and oil rigs coming to destroy the remnants of their culture.

In this book it's one bad thing after another. Sadly, Shan, who usually holds the book together, does very little actual detecting, and spends most of the book in a state of despair and depression. When he finally does his job, other events he has almost nothing to do with are more important to the resolution, which is positive but not entirely believable. Not helping was the amount of characters to keep track of in a long book. I'm still not entirely sure who killed Drakte, and wasn't the stone eye supposed to go in some statue it had been torn from? What happened to that?

I want to keep reading the series, which is incredible, but I hope Pattison kinda pulls it together in future books. Paperback Absolutely the best book yet by Eliot Pattison. I had a little trouble getting into it, but I think that was because of other things in my life, not the book. I couldn't put it down the last 100 pages, and it was just wonderful. Not technically a mystery, but it's story starts with a murder, and the guilty party is identified in the end. In between, so many things happen! I love reading about Tibet, about the mountains, the animals, the traditions and the people with which Pattison fills his world. Paperback If I had to name the one thing I love most about these books, it's Lokesh. He is one of the most likable and inspiring characters I have ever met in a book.

It's good I don't have to limit myself to just one thing, however, because that way I can also talk about Pattison's uncanny ability to describe a country and its traditions and people so well it truly feels like you are there, and you can feel the wind and sense the beauty. And I can talk about how powerful his descriptions of the crimes against the Tibetans are. And how beautiful his language is, and how he manages to combine the depressing truth with hope, even if it is fictional. But there are good people as well as bad, and it's good to be able to keep that in mind.

And what a great main character Inspector Shan is, and how wonderfully different these crime novels are because apart from trying to find out the truth, there's not much that's comparable to mainstream crime fiction. Since Shan is officially listed as an escapee from a labor camp, he can't go around and demand proof or do background check or call a crime lab or do any of the things detectives in other novels do. His quests for truth are a lot less straightforward but still told in such a compelling way that it's impossible to put the book down, even though there are no cheap thrills.

I don't think these books are everybody's cup of tea, but then again, which book ever is? But I love them a lot and I cannot wait to read the rest.

Oh, and one thing: usually I prefer to read books in English, if that's the original language. But for the first time in a while I understand people when they say they're used to the translation, and when the translation is as good as this, it's understandable. So I'm going to stick to the German version :) Paperback

When disgraced former inspector, Shan Tao Yun joins a group of reverent Tibetans returning a sacred artefact to its home, it seems he has at last found the peace he has struggled for since leaving prison. What starts as a spiritual pilgrimage, however, quickly turns into a desperate flight through the Tibetan wilderness as the outlawed monk who guides them is murdered and Sham discovers that the artefact has recently been stolen from the Chinese army. But why is the army so desperate to find the artefact entrusted to Shan? Why is an aged medicine lama being stalked by government agents? Why has an American woman, a geologist for an oil company, abandoned the project and fled into the mountains? Shan discovers not answers, but only new mysteries as he is drawn to such unexpected places as the raucous headquarters base of the Western oil venture and a monastery that seems more attuned to the teachings of the party than those of Buddha. And the further he travels into the mountains, the more Shan realises that what is at stake is not only justice but the spiritual survival of those who have joined his strange quest. At the heart of Pattison's powerful tale is a story of a brave, oppressed people who have learned to endure by drawing strength from their land and their rich spiritual traditions. Bone Mountain (Inspector Shan, #3)

Eliot Pattison é 6 Summary

Bone

Once I returned to the book , I really enjoyed it. It is very different. Paperback This review is very much an echo of my take on the previous volume in the series, Water Touching Stone. This book has a cleverly created main character, and a wonderful setting. It also has too many atrocities, too many characters, too many plotlines (with the result that coincidence seems to be a primary plot element), and too many grimaces (12, that I noticed). I started it in June, and it took until the end of December for me to finish it -- I kept reading until the atrocities got too painful, putting it aside for a time, reading another mystery in the meantime, then repeat.

There are positive elements, though, which is why I kept going back. And why I'll probably start the next one around next summer. Inspector Shan is an interesting, dynamic character, and modern rural Tibet is also fascinating as a setting. There's enough fascinating storytelling to overcome the superfluities.

But what, you ask, happens in this one? Well, I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that the hidden Tibetan monks have come into possession of the eye of a deity statue belonging to a remote valley, and they have an oracle that a Han is to carry it there. The Chinese Army is looking for this artifact, and Shan has no papers, so he's in constant risk of being arrested. Then somebody dies, and everything goes smash.

That summarizes the opening of MacGuffin #1, but we end up with #2-7, at least. My guess is that these books might be better for readers who skim, but are willing to sit still for a landscape description from time to time. Close readers will tend to slog. Paperback Bone Mountain is the third in Eliot Pattison's interesting series of thriller/mysteries about Shan, a former police inspector in Beijing who spent years in a Chinese prison because he refused to turn a blind eye to corruption in high places. He was exiled to a work camp in Tibet which was otherwise peopled by Tibetan monks and lamas. He learned much from his fellow inmates and when a Chinese official arranged for his unofficial release from prison, he made his way to those monks and lamas on the outside and cast his lot with them.

In the first two books in this series, I felt rather lost in the narrative. It was only with this entry that I began to feel that I could follow what the writer was trying to do, as I began to understand a bit more of the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.

At one point in the narrative, Lokesh, Shan's Tibetan lama friend, says that Tibetans like to walk for it keeps them connected to the earth and gives them time to contemplate. I am a gardener so I understand about connection to the earth and contemplation. Perhaps I have more in common with the Tibetan Buddhists than I realized.

The central story here is of Shan's guarding of a sacred relic which had been stolen from a village and has now been recovered and is being returned. He travels with a salt caravan which has secreted the relic and is carrying it back to its village. But then, on the journey, the relic mysteriously disappears and Shan must solve the mystery of that disappearance and recover the relic once again.

As with all of these stories, Shan's journey in search of the relic becomes a journey in search of enlightenment as he seeks his inner deity, even when he doesn't realize that is what he is seeking. Along the way, he picks up a mixed group of companions ranging from patriotic Tibetans trying to save their culture from the Chinese to an American diplomat seeking the body of a young geologist who has allegedly fallen to her death in the mountains.

Readers with a Western logical bent of mind will find it helpful to suspend their disbelief as they travel through the rugged Tibetan hills and valleys to finally reach Bone Mountain and the centuries-old cave of the medicine lamas. Along the way, we find that several of the characters are in need of redemption, even if they don't realize it at first, and, in the end, most of them find it, even a cold and cruel Chinese colonel who seems the least likely to be touched by the Tibetan philosophy.

This is a complex story that meanders along at a very slow pace. An unnecessarily slow pace, I think. The plotting is really incremental and repetitive. I know the Tibetan way of life is contemplative, but I don't think the telling of it has to be quite so turgid.

Moreover, Pattison has his favorite adverbs that he uses over and over and over again. (Who was it who said that the road to hell is paved with adverbs?) For example, things always seem to happen suddenly. People and animals appear suddenly. A character understands things suddenly. Mountains break apart and rivers appear suddenly. Little things like that just drive me mad!

This is a promising series about a fascinating culture. This book, however, was too long and too repetitive. I think it could have been made a lot better by a more ruthless editor. Paperback This is the third novel in Pattison's Shan series. Shan is a former government inspector, an ethnic Han Chinese from Beijing, exiled to Tibet (for having the misfortune of being slightly too successful in fighting public corruption). Pattison's Shan series quickly became one of my favorites last year, along with the superficially similar Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series. Both series are English language mysteries which involve Han Chinese, and both are really good, but there the similarities pretty much end.

Xiaolong's Chen is a confirmed bachelor, somewhat westernized and worldly (having studied English literature at the university), who fights crime and solves homicides as a Shanghai police official. In contrast, Shan (meaning Mountain in Mandarin), although ethnically Han and Taoist, is spiritual and idealistic, and comes to identify strongly with his fellow outcasts, Tibetan Buddhist monks. Unlike Chen, who manipulates the Communist system from within, Shan uses his knowledge of the apparatus as a former government official to affect the system from without, typically in defense of a downtrodden Tibetan.

The series - and the novel - are engaging in their own right, with a varied cast of characters, Han, Tibetan, and Foreigners. This novel, and the two previous novels, are written against the backdrop of the political and spiritual fissure between Tibet, the Communist Party, and predominantly Han provinces. The reader actually learns quite a bit of history, and plenty about both the P.R.C. and Tibet. After reading the first three novels (Did I mention they were all good?), I was intrigued and inspired enough to do some research, and the author puts a significant amount of history into his plots.

Regardless of your desire to learn about Tibet or Buddhism, the ultimate test of a mystery novel (or any fiction) is - is it entertaining? I bought one of the Pattison/Shan series as a gift for my mother, an avid mystery reader and connoisseur.

I think if you are giving a novel as a gift to your mother, that speaks for itself. Paperback I found this story too long and complex. However, it contained enough nuggets to keep me reading until the very end. Paperback