DRAGON'S EYE

The most compelling character in Oakes's melancholy, evocative new conspiracy thriller is the present-day city of Shanghai itself: dark and decadent and pulsing with menacing energy, with a suggestion of the lawlessness of an Old West town or gangland metropolis. Appropriately, Oakes's hero is a righteous veteran police officer, jaded but grimly determined to fulfill his professional duty. Senior Homicide Investigator Sun Piao suspects a government coverup almost immediately in the murder of eight unidentified victims whose bodies wash up on a Huangpu riverbank near Shanghai's busiest street, the Bund. The eyes are missing from the corpses, which are shackled together. Piao is warned, in increasingly unsubtle ways, not to investigate this crime too vigorously, but of course his character (and the conventions of the genre) demand that he pursue the case to its conclusion, even at his own peril. He has a history of wrangling with his boss, choleric Chief Liping. In the United States, politician Barbara Hayes loses sleep over her inability to reach son Bobby, an archeology student in China. Frustrated with government stonewalling, she flies to Shanghai to get some answers. Meanwhile, Piao has identified three of the victims as Bobby Hayes, his pregnant girlfriend, and his professor/mentor. He later learns that the corpses lack vital organs, and that the other five victims are prison inmates still listed as incarcerated. Barbara and Piao turn out to be kindred souls; their offbeat investigative pairing and growing relationship form the heart of the novel. Oakes often seems more interested in showing the reader Shanghai than in explaining the nuances of the plot or delineating his supporting characters, but his rich prose retains interest until the protracted finale. (Apr.)