2 BY ED LIN

Another author who has a few sitting on the shelves but who I haven’t yet tried.

I love the cover of This is a Bust and hopefully the book is as good. I do like the blending of Asian-American cultures in crime fiction. Bill Pronzini's Nameless has numerous trips to San Francisco's Chinatown and I've enjoyed other mysteries of a similar ilk - Thatcher Robinson's White Ginger and Black Karma spring to mind.

Leonard Chang, Henry Chang and S. J. Rozan sit in the tubs also.  

Ed Lin is a Taiwanese-American author with three Asian American Literary Awards to his name.

His full list of published novels is below….

Detective Robert Chow Series
This Is a Bust (2007)
Snakes Can't Run (2010)
One Red Bastard (2012)

Novels
Waylaid (2002)
Ghost Month (2014)
Incensed (2016)






The Chow novels which are the ones figuring on my shelves are set in the 70s and New York's Chinatown with unsurprisingly a Chinese-American detective. His last couple of novels have been set in Taiwan.

Ed Lin's website is here.


He's on Twitter - @robertchow






This Is a Bust (2007)


This Is a Bust, the second novel by award-winning author Ed Lin, turns the conventions of hard-boiled pulp stories on their head by exploring the unexotic and very real complexities of New York City's Chinatown, circa 1976, through the eyes of a Chinese-American cop. A Vietnam vet and an alcoholic, Robert Chow's troubles are compounded by the fact that he's basically community-relations window-dressing for the NYPD: he's the only Chinese American on the Chinatown beat, and the only police officer who can speak Cantonese, but he's never assigned anything more challenging than appearances at store openings or community events. Chow is willing to stuff down his feelings and hang tight for a promotion to the detective track, despite the community unrest that begins to roil around him. But when his superiors remain indifferent to an old Chinese woman's death, he is forced to take matters into his own hands. This Is a Bust is at once a murder mystery, a noir homage and a devastating, uniquely nuanced portrait of a neighborhood in flux, stuck between old rivalries and youthful idealism.

Snakes Can't Run (2010)

An epic of New York Chinatown noir in the vein of George Pelecanos and Richard Price, this is the riveting sequel to the highly acclaimed This Is a Bust

It's a hot summer in New York's Chinatown in 1976 and Robert Chow, the Chinese-American detective son of an illegal immigrant, takes on a new breed of ruthless human smugglers - snakeheads - when two bodies of smuggled Chinese are found dead under the Brooklyn Bridge underpass. But as Robert comes closer to finding some answers, he discovers a dark secret in his own family's past...