I recently wrote about the forces aligning that led me to John Burdett's Bangkok 8. I investigated what else he had written and discovered that the movie rights to his series of three books set in Bangkok (also Bangkok Haunts and BangkokTattoo) had been bought and are slated to start filming soon. But I also ran across this title, The Last Six Million Seconds, and after messing around with how much time that really was (about 2 months), was curious to find out its significance. The book is set in Hong Kong prior to the handover from Great Britain to mainland China and clocks everywhere are counting out the days, hours, minutes and seconds to June 30, 1997. Our protagonist, Chief Inspector Chan Siu-kai ("Charlie"), is another character defined by others and struggling with himself due to being only half of his chosen national identity, i.e., Chinese. The other half is Irish, but all of him is vehemently anti-communist since he attributes the murder of his mother Mai-Mai, to one of their many purges. Like the detective in the Bangkok series, he is incorruptible and therefore problematic for those who consider political expediencies a higher priority than solving crimes. The grisly murders that anchor this story are dubbed by the press as the "Mincer Murders" since 3 bodies were run through commercial meat grinders while still alive. A tip leads Chan to retrieve 3 heads, sealed in a plastic bag, floating in the sea on the jurisdictional border between Hong Kong and mainland China--raising hopes that the hamburger leftovers might be identified and help solve the murders. The plot is truly labyrinthine and involves the highest levels of government interfering in Chan's investigation. Absolutely no character is all good or all bad, although you would never want to cross paths with most of them. They are driven by history and greed and hopeless passions. Like Bangkok 8, this is not for the faint of heart but an absolutely engrossing thriller, with complex characters and atmospheric settings.
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