Midnight in Peking
by Paul French
Penguin/Viking
One winter night in Beijing in 1937, a British teenager was murdered, sparking a desperate hunt for her killers by her father - and efforts by British authorities to stop him.
Local people found Pamela Werner, an 18-year-old born and raised in Beijing, on the morning of January 8, 1937, close to the Fox Tower of the ancient city wall. The body was badly mutilated, with multiple stab wounds; her heart and other organs had been removed.
Paul French's book is the first account of this gruesome crime, which was never solved. It's written like a novel but everything is based on fact. It's a thriller that'll grip readers and hold their attention to the end.
The book describes, in vivid detail, the murder and the investigation conducted by Chinese and British police. It also captures the fatalism of the ancient capital, surrounded by Japanese troops and without hope of rescue by Chiang Kai-shek's army. Yet the Werners and most of the 3,000 foreigners there live a life of comfort and privilege, insulated from the suffering of millions of Chinese around them.
French is a talented storyteller, rolling out the tale step by step to keep us reading. He gives detailed portraits of the Werner family, the major figures of Beijing's foreign community, and the policemen handling the case. The detail is extraordinary: Pamela's movements on her last day, what she was wearing and the people she met that day. French also reconstructs her life in the capital and in Tianjin, where she attended a boarding school.