Water Touching Stone (Inspector Shan Tao Yun Series #2) Book

At our bookstore, this is shelved under crime, and yet I find myself hesitating to call it crime fiction. Yes, there is a murder - there are several murders, actually - and there is crime, and there is a detective, but this was unlike any other piece of crime fiction I ever read.

Although it's the second in a series of novels about detective Shan, this book was the first I read completely. I started reading the first book a while ago and even though I liked it, I didn't finish it and returned it. But by that time I had already borrowed the second book from someone else and since it was sitting here I figured I might as well read it.

And I'm really, really glad I did.

Shan Tao Yan, a former Chinese bureaucrat who ended up being sent to a Himalayan labor camp is helping two of his Tibetan friends discover the truth about the disappearance of a teacher in the Xinjiang region. The disappearance turns out to be a murder, and it seems that after the teacher, the students are in danger, too. But why was the teacher killed, and why are the students being hunted?

It's a very slow-paced book, and it does take a while to get going - and by that I mean far more than the usual 20 to 50 pages. But that didn't make it any less compelling for me - Shan and his traveling companions captured my attention right away and I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. During Shan's quest for truth, we also get an impression for what it's like to be living under Chinese rule for the different people living in the region, and many of the things that are described in this book are horrifying, to say the least. And we get an introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and its traditions.

What I loved best about this book is the quiet beauty of Pattison's writing. It's very calm and beautiful and, because of its calm, all the more powerful. It's difficult to describe, but his writing moved me more than anything I have read in a while.

The crime plot as such is well done and, once it does get going, the book is hard to put down. There are a lot of seemingly unconnected crimes and leads in the beginning, and I found myself asking where it would all lead, until it suddenly all came together and made sense. But the book would only be half as good if it weren't for the many "minor" characters we meet on Shan's journey - each with their own backstory, sometimes told only in one sentence.

It's a very sad book, at times, but there are also moments of hope in between, which make the sadness bearable. It's really a very beautiful book, and one I am really glad to have read. And I've already ordered the one before and the one after that.