I'm sorry, but it's so lovely to get nice reviews (and so horrid to get bad ones) that I just can't help myself. So here goes, from the Literary Review, an extremely fine publication:
'Taken as crime fiction, Sampson’s third novel is original, fast paced and clever: taken as a beginner’s guide to the enigma that is modern China, this is an outstandingly interesting description of life in Beijing from two utterly different angles. We see the busy, baffling society from the viewpoint of a Marlowe-style Chinese private eye, an honest, cussed altruist who deals equally with paupers and millionaires. He is of the generation that remembers what it was to vanish into police custody. In alternate chapters we follow a British woman journalist from 'the corporation' who endangers others through her naivety about what can and can't be done in a police state. Like the native Chinese born after the relaxation of the 1980s, she is 'taken by surprise when the system snapped its jaws around them and took them down into its belly'. The author lives in Beijing and was The Times correspondent there, so her own experience lends authority to a gripping mystery.'