From Publishers Weekly
Despite his firm grounding in Asian culture and the martial arts, and his assured prose style, Olden ( Dai-Sho ) produces here a sordid tale in which the villains are thoroughly detestable and the good guys only slightly less so. Park Song, aka Laughing Boy, is Korea's foremost counterfeiter of American currency and an old nemesis of NYPD detective Manny Decker. As Laughing Boy, he trains young girls, whom he has purchased at white slave auctions, in the ancient art of the Kisaeng (literally, "recreational creature") and brutally murders them after his perverse appetite is slaked. When Decker discovers that the daughter of an ex-lover has been kidnapped specifically for Laughing Boy, his hunt takes him down an international trail of political and police corruption, sexual perversity and intergovernmental back-scratching. The effect of so many hateful, depraved characters is exacerbated by the lack of likable heroes, earmarking this difficult, grim novel for special tastes only.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Writerly thriller from the author of such martial-arts epics as Gaijin, Giri, Oni, etc. Olden is master of swift, fact-crammed prose that gives a surface credibility to plots built entirely on coincidence, the philosophic structure of the Olden universe; and he is superior to just about all thriller writers for knockout characterizations and superbly whimsical dialogue whose menace and tension flatten the reader's nose to the page while snapping his fingers. Here, top Korean counterfeiter Park Song, who has some hundred-dollar plates made by the U.S. Treasury for running off untraceable bills in Asia during the Vietnam War, obsesses on very young girls whom he likes to groom as ``kisaengs'' (Korean for geisha, or ``recreational creature'') and--when he tires of them or lusts for a new sex recreation--to slash with a razor, bite viciously, and join with as or after they die. During the war Park Song met up with Manny Decker's army team and killed them but not their leader. Now Manny is a detective sergeant in the NYPD and Park Song has had Tawny DeSilva, the beauteous teenage daughter of Manny's former lover Gail, kidnapped for transport to Asia along with a cageful of nude teeners. Typical Olden description (of renegade detective Ben Dumas): ``Man had to be anxious around a dude who not only killed people but who'd once strangled a drug dealer's pit bull to death with his bare hands.'' Paced throughout are bonebreaking martial- arts nerve-paralyzers set in odd places such as the kitchen of a fancy Midtown restaurant or in an icy lake. Hard talk and eye-popping characters who cry out for film while satisfying Olden's faithful band of mainliners. --
Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
