This book provides the hat-trick of good “midnight” reads for me, starting with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil then Midnight in Sicily and now Midnight in Peking. They all fall outside my preferred reading but I enjoyed them nonetheless. This is not to say that I’m going to plunge headlong into true crime but Paul French’s writing is certainly compelling. His subject matter is the gruesome murder of a young Englishwoman in Peking in 1937. His purpose is to present his understanding of how it came about and why no-one was brought to justice. The star of the book is Peking herself and the tumultuous period of her history.
BiP staff review by Sue
