IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of an idea for a detective story must be in want of an interesting detective. Or perhaps the other way around.
In any event, Nury Vittachi has come up with a most ingenious solution to a problem faced by many a writer of detective yarns.
While G K Chesterton's Father Brown is a priest, of course, Agatha Christie's Miss Marples a village busybody, and Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey a blue-blooded dilettante, Vittachi's C F Wong practises geomancy. From the down-at-heel offices of C F Wong & Associates in an unfashionable part of Singapore, Wong makes a living of sorts by practising the ancient art of fung shui on behalf of clients seeking better fortune or merely to ensure their environment exploits the forces of nature to full advantage.
Yet in the course of his peaceful vocation, Wong stumbles on extraordinary mischief and mayhem. In almost every one of the nine stories that make up this attractive collection, he finds that what starts out as a routine analysis of a building or a location veers off in unexpected and often perilous directions.
Inspecting a jungle theme park, whose owners had recently been eaten by its resident lions, Wong himself comes close to becoming the big cats' dinner.
An eccentric client's plea for help reveals that a body had been dumped in the back yard of her house in a Singapore suburb.