Friday, December 21, 2001
Title: The Chinese Girl
Author: John Barker
Publisher: Orion
The Chinese Girl is a bit of a misleading title I guess, but given that is what Stone Lewis thinks he has found on his doorstep then that's where the idea comes from. Stone Lewis has been out of prison for 6 weeks, not along time when you've been there for the last 11 years after killing a man. In that time he swore revenge on the man he should have killed, the man who scarred his mother, the man who had his face tattooed while he was in prison. On the way home from work one night he finds a man running from his doorway, leaving behind an unconscious woman, who Stone initially thinks is a Chinese girl. Rather than calling the police, he takes her into his house, convinced that if he gets the police involved they will think he did it and put him back in prison. He soon finds that the girl has grown up locally and been living in America for the last few years, but with the disappearance of an old friend she has returned to investigate. Stone decides to help her and as the book progresses it looks like they may in fact have a common enemy.
John Baker's story is unusual in a couple of ways. The biggest being that a substantial amount of the first part of the book is given over to the letters of the missing woman, which to a degree fills in background detail, but also manages to knock out the pacing of the book for a period. The fact that Stone has a number of tattoos on his face and is fresh out of prison make him a conflicted "hero" - but some of that is lost by the manner in which he got the tattoos and the projection of him being "really handsome" underneath, which makes him more of a cliché. A reasonable enough read, especially for the curiosity of being set in Hull, Britain with an odd cast of characters.
RVWR: PTR
December 2001
