Blood ties

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S.J. Rozan

"Private investigator Lydia Chin has lived in New York City's Chinatown all her life. But even to those born and raised in this city-within-a-city, where the power structure is often based on perceptions and shifting alliances, the complex interactions of Chinatown can be elusive.". "The Chinese Restaurant Workers' Union - a new, unaligned, and untried union - is making waves in Chinatown by trying to organized the restaurant workers, challenge the powerful restaurant owners, and shift the balance of power. When four restaurant workers, one of them a union organizer, disappear with no known reason and without a trace, the union's lawyer reluctantly hires Lydia Chin to find the missing men. With her sometimes-partner Bill Smith, Lydia soon discovers that she is not the only one looking for them. Approached by all sides and alternately pressured to drop the case and to solve it quickly, Lydia finds herself in the middle of a mysterious conflict between two powerful Chinatown rivals, the New York City police, a struggling union, and a shadowy pair of federal agents. And four missing men, possessing a deadly secret, whose very lives hang in the balance."--BOOK JACKET.

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Sue Grafton

It's April 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office catching up on paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy a beer, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. More than two decades ago, a four-year-old girl disappeared, and a recent newspaper story about her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial and could identify the killers if he saw them again. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the grave and finding the men. It's way more than a long shot, but he's persistent and willing to pay cash up front. Reluctantly, Kinsey agrees to give him one day of her time. But it isn't long before she discovers Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he's the boy who cried wolf. Is his story true, or simply one more in a long line of fabrications? Moving between the 1980s and the 1960s, and changing points of view as Kinsey pursues witnesses whose accounts often clash, Grafton builds multiple subplots and memorable characters. Gradually we see how everything connects in this thriller. And as always, at the heart of her fiction is Kinsey Millhone, a sharp-tongued, observant loner who never forgets that under the thin veneer of civility is a roiling dark side to the soul

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William Kotzwinkle

A wealthy Madison Avenue antiquities dealer is murdered while playing a game the pharaohs once played - the Game of Thirty. Enter Jimmy McShane, hired to find the killed but instead McShane finds that the killer is playing the Game of Thirty with him, and all of Manhattan is the board on which they make their moves, from the upper reaches of New York society to the lower depths of life around Times Square, where the game takes an unexpected turn, and McShane follows his quarry through a world of high-priced sexual slavery. In this haunting hovel, Kotzwinkle sets his dazzling imagination against the streetwise wit of Jimmy McShane, a private eye for the nineties, a droll philosopher whose insight comes from his having shadowed humanity into its darkest corners. The Game of Thirty is pure entertainment whose inner lining is literature.

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Reed Farrel Coleman

I tried to read this book, but the incredible amount of errors it contained made it much too difficult to follow the story line. It might be a good book. Any way to fix this?