I picked this short story up on amazon as I’ve been wanting to try this author, Stephen Leather, for a while. I have to admit it took me a while to decide what I thought of it.
The character, Inspector Zhang, is quite quirky, but in a fairly stereotypical way. He reminded me a fair bit of Sherlock holmes and I think that was probably deliberate but I didn’t feel like I got to know him well enough, which is often the problem with short stories. Less time for character development. I did really like this one though, but I’m a huge Sherlock fan. It managed to press the same buttons.
The plot was a pretty standard who-dunnit. Nothing hugely special but still fun to read.
I was a little dissapointed with the length of the story as it finished at 58% on my kindle. I don’t mind there being some back matter but it seemed a little excessive that it was almost half the file and made it feel like this short was only there to get me to buy something else. If I like a story, I’ll go check out more by that author anyway, I don’t need 3 chapters of a completely different book to make me want more, one would have been enough, or just the list of the authors other works.