From Amazon.co.uk
Every once in a while a book comes along that combines larger-than-life epic adventure; idiomatic, pungent historical detail and genuine storytelling panache. Tom Bradby’s
The Master of Rain is such a book, carrying the reader headlong into a breathless tale of double-dealing and murder in 1920s Shanghai. What’s more, Bradby never allows his sprawling canvas to overwhelm his beleaguered characters who always remain in keen focus.
Richard Field, Bradby’s resourceful protagonist, has been seconded to the police force in the turbulent city of Shanghai. He finds a jostling mélange of British Imperial civil servants, American gunrunners and vicious Chinese gangsters. The grisly case he is landed with involves the mutilated body of a young White Russian woman and Field discovers that her neighbour, Natasha Medvedev, is somehow crucial to the investigation. But Natasha’s only agenda is self-preservation and Field finds himself unwisely falling in love with her. Can he crack the mystery before the next victim falls--particularly as the signs are that it is to be Natasha?
This is splendidly evocative writing from the author of the first-rate Shadow Dancer. Masterly in its depiction of a beautiful, dirty and corrupt city and a population in thrall to the imperatives of the market: human life, like everything else in Shanghai, has its price. Field is the perfect conduit for the reader through the glittering decay of the city and his relationships (both with the beguiling Natasha and the panoply of quirky, dangerous characters he encounters) are adroitly handled by Bradby. The book is nearly 500 pages long but the reader will find that it has the pace and compulsiveness of a short story. --Barry Forshaw
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
British TV newsman Bradby used his time in Hong Kong to do some research on 1920s-era Shanghai, the result of which is this hefty first novel of corruption, debauchery and decaying colonialism. Richard Field, a young policeman from Yorkshire, lands a job in the Special Branch of Shanghai's police department circa 1926. Honest but naeve, the Englishman falls into a snake pit of corruption and rivalry, revealed when a Russian prostitute is savagely murdered by a maniac. The trail leads to local gangster "Pockmark" Lu Huang, a powerful opium smuggler; when evidence begins disappearing and mysterious cash deposits are made to his bank account, Field knows the department is dirty, but can't get support from anyone except his sidekick Caprisi (a pugnacious American transplant who cut his teeth fighting Capone in Chicago). What's more, Field falls hard for the dead Russian's neighbor, Natasha Medvedev, who is one of "Lu's girls" and therefore, as Field discovers, highly likely to meet a fate similar to her neighbor's, which Field learns is only one in a string of such homicides. But when Field's investigation threatens Lu's opium ring, Lu lashes out at the foreign police force and the body count rises precipitously. The novel works better as a multilayered mystery than as a period piece, as the background historical issues are obscured by the more modern focus on frenzied sex and death. Likewise, the obvious film noir look the author goes for is undermined by the late 20th-century serial-killer shtick he injects into the plot. Despite the periodic glimpse of Western elitism and building Chinese sympathy for communism, there is remarkably little use of local color (language, food, local customs) to satisfy readers of historical thrillers, though the mystery plot doesn't disappoint. Major ad/promo; author tour.
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