CHINA TRADE

The setting of this entertaining mystery, New York's Chinatown, with its food, its smells, its street hoods, and its clan leaders, is not its only strength, but is certainly its greatest one. Beautiful PI Lydia Chin is hired to solve a theft of antique porcelains from a struggling Chinatown museum, a puzzle with pieces scattered all over New York. Christine Marshall is wonderful with the Chinese-American accents but considerably less strong with the inevitable others, and she has a tendency to place emphasis so oddly that you wonder if she is aware of what the sentences mean, or only of the individual words. This is not fatal to the fun to be had here, though. Lydia's implacable Chinese mother is alone worth the price of admission. B.G. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 07/ JAN 08]