Il carnevale di Schignano in Val d'Intelvi Book

From Wikipedia: Judge Dee (also, Judge Di) is a semi-fictional character based on the historical figure Di Renjie, county magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. The character appeared in the 18th-century Chinese detective and gong'an crime novel "Di Gong An". After Robert van Gulik came across it in an antiquarian book store in Tokyo, he translated the novel into English and then used the style and characters to write his own original Judge Dee historical mystery stories.
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This is No. 15 out of 17 in Robert van Gulik's "Judge Dee" series. In the olden days of China, a judge or magistrate had investigative powers and often doubled as a sort of detective in getting to the bottom of a case before passing his verdict (sort of like the French system now). I have not read any other book in this series before and chose this because I read an article saying this was one of the better ones.

There are actually three murder / missing person cases going on simultaneously in this book, which, at the outset, we are unsure as to whether they are related. The web of characters, clues and developments is very wide and at times it was a challenge keeping up with the entire thing. Fans of puzzle mysteries will probably find this complexity fun. The novel really focuses more on the process of evidence discovery, as such, character development is not a primary factor, although it does get a bit more "feely" towards the second half. Overall, I quite enjoyed reading this since it was based in an ancient setting. [Final rating: 3.75*]