Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Disillusioned by corruption and the yawning chasm between rich and poor he has seen, the socialist idealism of his youth has turned to dust. His yin and yang are way out of balance.

Seeking refuge in poetry and literature, Chen hopes to find new purpose in his life, if only to escape the dubious celebrity his role in a number of sensitive and high-profile cases has attracted.

But when Shanghai has its first taste of a serial killer who strangles his female victims and leaves their bodies, clad only in a red mandarin dress of a style last seen in the 1960s, in public places, his political and police superiors, and the sensationalist media, demand his involvement.

Already wrestling with the intricacies of a housing development corruption scandal that reaches high up among fellow party cadres and is the subject of a party power struggle in Beijing, Chen drops off the radar.

In contemplating the echo of Confucian ethics in everyday Chinese life, the beauty of Tang poetry, the simple pragmatism of Buddhism, and the spectral Cultural Revolution, his health restored by a bizarre medicinal banquet, he finds the key to his confounding puzzles.

With China attracting more and more attention from increasingly sophisticated readers, Qiu Xiaolong is a fascinating guide to the many problems facing Beijing. Though cautiously set in the 1990s, Chen's experiences have a contemporary edge that effectively captures the problems of Chinese society today.

Red Mandarin Dress is his fifth Inspector Chen novel and follows his best-selling A Case of Two Cities, Death of a Red Heroine, A Loyal Character Dancer, and his acclaimed debut When Red is Black.

Still, a widening readership could prove to be his undoing.

The first half of Red Mandarin Dress drags, weighed down by background. Qiu would do better to let the reader work a little than pander to basic ignorance.

His strength lies in taking his readers through the cultural barriers of language and culture to experience a China hidden from non-Chinese speakers.

Born in Shanghai in 1953, Qiu offers a fresh perspective on the forces shaping the new China and the still unacknowledged influences of the Cultural Revolution. Though living in the US, he worries about China's future and its refusal to recognise past atrocities as anything more than what Mao Zedong called 'an unfortunate mistake'.

Qiu has said Chen is who he might have been had he stayed in Shanghai and it's significant to Chen's character that the socialist revolution was by no means a bad thing, and certainly preferable to what has replaced it.

Both share a passion for poetry and food, and Red Mandarin Dress serves generous portions of classic poetry and literature alongside sparrow tongues and snake, and the simple fare of mutton soup.

Food is used to particularly brutal effect. 'The climax of the banquet came in - a caged monkey with its head sticking out, its skull shaved, and its limbs fixed. A waiter put the cage down for them to inspect, holding a steel knife and a small brass ladle, smiling, and waiting for the sign. Chen had heard of the special course before. The monkey's skull was sawed off, so the diners could enjoy the live brain so fresh and bloody.'

There's a cruelty, too, to the serial killings, investigation of which requires lifting the rug on individual and collective acts of brutality and manifest injustice that went unpunished after the Cultural Revolution.

A clever motif runs through the book - revenge, which Alexandre Dumas thought best served cold in The Count of Monte Cristo. It was the only foreign book allowed in China during the Cultural Revolution because Madam Mao happened to like it.

She took her revenge on those who had looked down on her as a B-grade actress before she married Mao. And the question of vengeance, or, at least, redress for the Cultural Revolution's many injustices, still simmers today.