Free Dreams of Justice by Dick Adler Page B

in its depiction of how dangerous politics can be to human life.
    THE SKULL MANTRA, by Eliot Pattison (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
    There is no faster way to get under the skin of a country in turmoil than with the needle of a murder investigation. Nothing I’ve read or seen about how China has systematically crushed the soul of Tibet has been as effective as “The Skull Mantra,” a debut thriller by a veteran journalist that uses that hoary plot device of a discredited detective being given a chance to redeem himself by clearing a politically dangerous case.
    Like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, Shan Tao Yun was once a high-ranking communist cop: the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, specializing in fraud cases. Now, because he offended someone too high up in the food chain, he is a laborer in a Tibetan gulag called the People’s 404th Construction Brigade in the Himalayas, breaking rocks along with some hard-core Buddhist monks and other troublemakers. Shan manages to survive under these harsh conditions because of the spiritual guidance of his fellow prisoners, whose unshakeable belief rings with the simple poetry of pure courage.
    Then the headless body of a local Chinese official turns up near a road-construction site, wearing American clothes and carrying American cash. The missing head soon appears in a cave with great religious significance: It’s the resting place for the skulls of dead monks. The shrewd army colonel in charge of the district asks Shan to investigate. Offers of better food and conditions are mixed with threats against his monk friends.
    Col. Tan wants a quick and dirty job that implicates a monk found near the cave, but Shan is certain the man isn’t guilty. More likely killers include other high-ranking Chinese officials and two American mining entrepreneurs who had personal and financial dealings with the dead man.
    Eliot Pattison makes Shan a fascinating mixture of understandable depression and growing spiritualism, a man who has managed to defuse his anger but not turn off his belief in doing good. The other main characters are equally complex: The monks are sharply separate but spiritually unified personalities; Col. Tan seems at first to be just a time-serving bureaucrat, but his motives are not at all straightforward; and the American woman who wants to protect the skull cave and make money from local oil is another interesting blend.
    Then there’s Shan’s temporary aide, an ambitious and conflicted young Tibetan called Yeshe who can “sound like a monk one moment and a party functionary the next.” The physical background, ranging from the barren hills of the gulag to the achingly beautiful mountains just out of reach, also helps to mark this as a thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements.
    WOLVES EAT DOGS, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
    From his first appearance, in 1981’s “Gorky Park,” through his last, “Havana Bay” in 1999, Arkady Renko has been the perfect dark mirror of his time and place in history—the replacement of Cold War Russia by what passes now for a more democratic and capitalist society.
    Martin Cruz Smith’s police detective has certainly paid the price for his obstinate loyalties to truth and justice during those years, suffering physical and psychological trauma in a withering variety of settings. He is as out of place in the so-called New Russia as “an ape encountering fire” as he thinks when he sees a sleek new computer. “Stop using the phrase ‘New Russian’ when you refer to a crime,” his superior tells him wearily. “We’re all New Russians, aren’t we?”
    “I’m trying,” Renko replies, and in his own way he is. When a powerful billionaire named Pasha Ivanov (a man photographed often with world leaders, including Putin “who, as usual seemed to suck on a sour tooth”), commits suicide, Renko just wants to do a thorough job of investigating. When he takes the sadly silent and badly