Citizen One
by Andy Oakes
Dedalus, HK$165
In Citizen One, the second of Andy Oakes' Sun Paio series, the detective emerges from the state detention system bruised and battered, both physically and mentally.
It is, perhaps, the pain of his incarceration that drives Sun into one deadly situation after another, leaving his career and often his life hanging by a thread, as he takes on the big boys in China's warped power structure.
A death wish is just one of the many sad results of his detention.
Against the judgment of those higher up, that of his peers and sometimes, it seems, the better wishes of Sun himself, the detective investigates a series of horrific murders of young women. The victims are subjected to grisly torture before being put to death amid an orgy of sex and violence. They're then entombed in concrete at the fictional New National Stadium in Shanghai. Sun delves ever deeper into the power structure of the old guard and the new power and their progeny who compete to run the show in modern China, well out of reach of the justice system. As he risks all for himself and his long-suffering sidekick, the Big Man, Sun discovers just how high up the corruption goes.
