in California, St. Denis writes compelling historical mysteries with thriller and international espionage elements.
St. Denis's new novel is Killer Art.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. St. Denis's reply:
I am spending the summer months in Hong Kong as usual and while here I always try to fill in some of my many blank spots in Chinese history and culture. This summer I am finally digging into a book I have long been looking forward to reading, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt.Visit Jon St. Denis's website.
This is a great read, filled with a legion of characters on the British, American, and Chinese sides of what became a deciding event in the creation of modern China.
At the time, the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China was the fourth-largest empire in world history, a respected and wealthy land under the Qing (the ‘Q’ is pronounced like ‘ch’) dynasty. However, by the early nineteenth century, that Empire was slowly in decline, ultimately becoming the final Chinese dynasty.
Contact with the West hastened that decline, which was capped off by the Opium Wars with the British Empire between 1839 and 1842, in which the British Empire shamefully forced the sale of the drug, opium, on China. Defeat in this war led to China’s century of shame and humiliation that ultimately helped lead, in turn, to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and the firm conviction by China and the Chinese that they would never be humiliated like that again.
And I promise that Platt’s book is nowhere as dry as this brief description.
But it’s not all historical reading for me. I have come late to the work of John Grisham. Better late than never. Currently reading The Chamber. A fine writer, but got to admit a bit of a rankle. Why the hell can’t these lawyer chaps stay in their own lane? They are already making a good living with the law. Now they come to cut into the literary pie as well?
But I forgive him.
The Page 69 Test: Killer Art.
--Marshal Zeringue
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