Water Touching Stone (Inspector Shan Tao Yun)
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Thrillers › Suspense
ISBN: 0312206127 / Publisher: Minotaur Books, June 2001
Former Beijing police investigator Shan Tao Yun heads for a remote Tibetan plateau to investigate the murder of a venerated teacher and the subsequent disappearance of a lama.
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An unlikely group of outcasts dash across the remote northern reaches of the Tibetan plateau, summoned by the news that a venerated schoolteacher has been murdered and an ancient lama is missing. Two old Tibetans are rushing to restore the spiritual balance lost by the violent death. A sullen Tibetan resistance fighter is racing to battle a new foe. But Shan Tao Yun, the exiled former investigator from Beijing, just released from four years in the gulag, has set out to find justice, an elusive goal among the embittered and forgotten people of western China.As he follows the grim path left by the killer, Shan soon finds himself in the dangerous world of the borderlands, populated by vengeful Chinese officials, corrupt soldiers of the People's Liberation Army, daring smugglers, hidden Buddhists, and remnants of the proud Kazakh Moslem clans. One by one, young boys, all students of the dead teacher, are being murdered.Guided by a spirited young Kazakh woman, Shan begins to peel away the many layers of secrets that hide the true motives of the killer. Together they stumble across the body of a dead American in the local prison, are brought to the haunting ruins of an ancient buried city along the Old Silk Road, search for an apparent infiltrator of the dissident movement, and discover a team of foreign scientists clandestinely working to reveal the truth about the region's ethnic heritage.One moment experiencing the serene reverence of an ancient shrine, the next feeling the horror of being buried alive in the desert, Shan encounters the many faces of courage found among oppressed peoples. Ultimately Shan's answer can be found only by revealing still greater tragedies, and justice, in the rough form he has come to expect in Tibet, is available only if he is able to pierce the hatred and distrust that have been bred by Beijing's rule.
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