Author: Eliot Pattison

Publisher: Minotaur Books

ISBN: 978-1-250-16968-6

Bones of the Earth is Eliot Pattison's tenth Inspector Shan Tao Yun mystery, the second this site has reviewed. We reviewed first in the series, Skeleton God about two years ago.

Inspector Shan is Chinese, but he was too diligent and honest for his own good in a Beijing investigation and ended up in a work camp in Tibet where he added Tibetan to his native Mandarin Chinese and English. Over the course of the series, Shan has gained the protection and grudging respect of Colonel Tan, the Chinese Army officer who essentially rules Tibet. As a result, Shan has not only been released from the gulag, but been appointed the constable of a backwater village.

Bones of the Earth gets underway when Shan is required to witness the execution of a corrupt Tibetan   engineer. But was it an execution or was it judicial murder? The dead man had been working on the Five Claws Dam, a huge hydroelectric project in Colonel Tan's territory. When something does not seem right and Shan looks at the case file, it's obvious to an experienced investigator that the dead man was framed. And Tan, concerned that something he does not control is being built in his fief, not to mention a dead man found in a train car carrying military material, appoints Shan Special Inspector  to inspect matters.

It becomes clear almost immediately that the Five Claws project is problematic. The valley the dam's water will flood is sacred to Tibetan Buddhism. An American religious archeologist and her Chinese professor have died in a dodgy car accident. The project is destroying a couple thousand years of Tibetan history--and the site's geology is not ideal for a dam anyway. What's going on?

Shan has to figure that out while dealing with the Five Claws project director and his assistant, with the Public Security Bureau (the police), with the Bureau of Religious Affairs (charged with protecting indigenous religious artifacts), with the People's Liberation Army, with the 404th People's Construction Brigade (Shan's former prison unit and currently his son Ko's), with Tibetan patriots, and more and more. Shan has Colonel Tan's support, but given all the currents and cross currents in his world, that may not be enough to bring villains to justice. 

Pattison says he first traveled to China less than a month after relations were normalized between Washington and Beijing. He worked as a lawyer helping companies understand how to invest there. "My work became a platform for me to meet people at all ranks in the government, from ministers on down, as well as a chance to mingle in the streets of cities and towns throughout China and traditional Tibet."

He says Shan became an amalgam of many people he met, "people who have endured, preserving traditions, family, and integrity despite tremendous, sometimes violent, pressures to abandon them. These include professors sent to prison for possessing Western literature, officials whose lives were ruined because they declined to be cowed by the Communist Party, herders who were forced into factory jobs, then eventually, often illegally, found ways to return to their beloved pastures, and, of course, monks who survived incredible adversity to maintain their faith and identity."

Pattison probably cannot return to China—or Tibet—given his descriptions of the Chinese depredations. Here, from Bones of the Earth, is Shan regarding a cache of illegal texts: "Tibetan books were all hand-printed, their carved wooden printing plates carefully guarded and treasured by generations of monks. Religious Affairs had not only destroyed millions of such books but also scores of thousands of printing plates, making bonfires of the often centuries-old carvings, which meant that there were probably books on Tserung's shelves that were the only one of their kind surviving, never to be printed again . . ." 

One pleasure of Bones of the Earth is the incidental information the book conveys about Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, and the texture of daily life. But the main pleasure is to follow Shan as he tries to maintain his own integrity in a broken, corrupt, and dangerous world.