Stealing Time (April Woo Detective Series)

NYPD Detective April Woo faces conflict in all directions--from bosses who are dubious about a woman in a macho department; to her Chinese mother, who is unwilling to see her child assimilated in a foreign world; and her boyfriend, who is pushing her toward commitment. April must negotiate her way through all these delicate relationships as she tries to find a missing Chinese-American baby. Kathy Hsieh's April is enormously appealing, if perhaps a bit innocent-sounding for a veteran police officer. More impressive are Hsieh's side characters, particularly April's mother and a wily Chinese woman who seems to know more about the crime than she lets on. Hsieh's reading perfectly captures the mixture of suspicion, guile, and manipulation that are part of Glass's complex characters. M.O. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

April Woo (Judging Time, 1998, etc.) straddles two incompatible worlds: As a detective sergeant in the NYPD, she must be ambitious and aggressive; as the daughter of superstitious, demanding Chinese parents, she must be obedient and deferential. These tensions are the most involving aspect of this novel heavy on plot and coincidence. When Heather Rose Papescu, the Chinese-American wife of an affluent lawyer, is beaten and her adopted baby vanishes, it seems a straightforward kidnapping case. But Heather refuses to identify her attacker, and she and her husband, Anton, cannot produce adoption papers. Woven into the story is the plight of deathly ill Lin Tsing, an illegal alien working in a Chinatown factory owned by Anton's brutal relatives; Lin feels betrayed by her cousin, Nanci, who, coincidentally, was April's childhood friend. April's investigation of a case involving interracial marriage, meanwhile, prompts guilt over her affair with Latino cop Mike Sanchez. As the search for an apparently illegitimate baby continues, April examines her relationship with her parents, comparing her sense of assimilation with Heather's, who has also rejected Chinese traditions, and with Nanci's, who lives within them. While this overpopulated, overschematized story ends on an up beat, it's the themes of shame, guilt and familial obedience that make it work. Agent, Nancy Yost.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.