A murder mystery reveals a trite China

By NISID HAJARI

isa See's second book begs to be judged by its cover. Under the blood-red title the novel announces that it is "a thriller." Inside, the dustjacket contends that Flower Net (HarperCollins; 333 pages) "rips the veil away from modern China." The story--of the murder of two well-connected youths, one Chinese and the other American, as part of a conspiracy involving smuggled bear bile--promises to reveal not just a killer, but a culture.

Unfortunately See--who won good reviews for her 1995 memoir of her Chinese-American family, On Gold Mountain--obscures this latest work with a fog of cliches, alarmist stereotypes and well-worn themes. Her "modern China" is the Soviet Union of a thousand cold war potboilers: everywhere that Inspector Liu Hulan and her lover, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Stark, go, they are watched (an fbi agent helpfully warns that authorities may try to blackmail the American into spying for Beijing). Chinese who emigrate to America "escape" there, while even Stark, after tensions rise between the U.S. and the People's Republic over the sale of nuclear triggers, immediately wonders "if it was still safe for him to be in the country." After all, "people disappeared in China all the time."

Many of these cliches serve as clumsy setups for the Americans, whose wide-eyed questions ("But all that must be for serious crimes," Stark says of rampant executions) permit See to expound upon China's evolution, and a host of other topics. She hits every hot-button issue that has occupied headlines in the past decade: illegal immigration, sweatshops, the smuggling of banned animal parts, corruption, Beijing's smugly capitalist "princelings," human rights. (See even manages to tie in a florid Cultural Revolution "struggle session.") But the contrived monologues bog down the book's other mystery--the rather pedestrian detective story that brings investigators around to (gasp!) a culprit whom no one would suspect. Ultimately one might have excused the triteness of See's China, if only this story were not so flatly predictable.

--By Nisid Hajari