Death Doesn't Forget

May 2, 2022
In Lin’s intriguing fourth novel starring Taipei food stall operator Jing-nan (after 2018’s 99 Ways to Die), Siu-lien, the mother of Jing-nan’s girlfriend, buys some cigarettes for her boyfriend, Boxer, and the receipt’s number is drawn in the latest government lottery, winning her 200,000 New Taiwan dollars. (To track taxable income, every receipt in Taiwan is automatically entered in this lottery, incentivizing consumers to request one.) Boxer and Siu-lien agree to split the money evenly, but after he cashes in the receipt, he reneges on their agreement. Jing-nan, who has become a celebrity thanks to his previous misadventures, agrees to try to recoup Siu-lien’s share, but he gets only a small portion of it from Boxer. Soon afterward, Boxer is bludgeoned to death, and the police focus on Jing-nan, the last person known to have seen him alive, and with a motive, as the killer. Lin ups the ante on his lead with a second murder, and once again he brings to life the sights and smells of the night market where Jing-nan works. Fans of recognizably human amateur sleuths will be pleased. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

May 1, 2022

More than action thrillers, Lin's delightful "Taipei Night Market" novels are stories of character and place. Jing-nan owns a popular food stall in Taipei. He's not the hero type, but trouble repeatedly finds him; he has to extricate himself from complications he didn't ask for and isn't prepared to address. In this case, it's murder--two of them. The lowlife boyfriend of the estranged mother of Jing-nan's girlfriend Nancy absconds with family money; Nancy asks Jing-nan to act as go-between in retrieving it. The boyfriend is found murdered after Jing-nan's visit, and a police captain who hates Jing-nan arrests him, ordering torture in an attempt to extort a confession. Jing-nan is eventually set free, but then the captain is murdered. Jing-nan, Nancy, Nancy's mother, and Jing-nan's trusty employees Frankie the Cat and Dwayne are drawn into the increasingly confusing hunt for the real killer. The resolution of Lin's series fourth (after 99 Ways To Die) pushes the bounds of believability but has a rousing finale. VERDICT Once again, it's hellzapoppin' time in Taipei. If readers haven't tried Lin's stylish mysteries, here's a good place to start.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2022
Jing-nan, the proprietor of a Taipei night-market food stall, Unknown Pleasures, is thrown into another underworld adventure (his fourth, following 99 Ways to Die, 2018) when girlfriend Nancy's estranged mother, Siu-Lien, calls in a favor. Siu-Lien's ne'er-do-well boyfriend, Boxer, has gone on a bender with their lottery winnings and she figures that Boxer will be intimidated by Jing-nan's reputation for battling it out with Taipei's worst criminals. Jing-nan reluctantly heads to Boxer's bolt-hole and retrieves what's left of the windfall. After Boxer is found bludgeoned to death, however, Jing-nan's effort to help his abrasive almost-mother-in-law is rewarded with an accusation of murder from his nemesis, Captain Huang. Shockingly, just days later, Huang is also murdered. Thankfully, Jing-nan is cleared, but loyalty to Nancy drives him to appease Siu-Lien by digging into Boxer's murder. Jing-nan takes readers on a tour of everyday Taipei, balancing exposure of sobering gender inequalities, marginalized aboriginals, and cowboy policing with irreverent wit.

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May 15, 2022
A big Taipei lottery prize spells disaster for the winner and everyone around him. The preliminary squabbles between Boxer, a grifting bartender and bouncer in the BaBa Bar, and his live-in girlfriend, BaBa barmaid Siu-lien, about whom the promised NT$200,000 really belongs to, signal further troubles to come. Of course Boxer will claim the money without Siu-lien; of course he'll throw around much of it before he has to see her again; of course he'll go back to the pigsty he was living in before they moved in together while he still has some cash on hand. When Siu-lien asks her daughter Nancy's boyfriend, Chen Jing-nan, to face Boxer down and demand Siu-lien's share, he succeeds in extracting only NT$21,500 from him, which he describes as good news and bad news. But no one would have predicted that Boxer would be slashed to death shortly afterward, or that Jing-nan, spotted by security cameras leaving Boxer's building around the time of his death, would be arrested by Capt. Huang, carried off from Unknown Pleasures, the food stand he runs in the Shilin Night Market, and tortured in hope of extracting a confession. And certainly no one would ever have predicted that the next victim would be Capt. Huang himself. After these twists, the identification of the killer comes as less of a surprise; what lingers in the memory, as always in the Taipei Night Market novels, is the flavorsome portrait of the city, this time with particular and highly effective attention to its Aboriginal Australian population. Maybe not better than a trip to Taipei but more likely in these troubled times.

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