The Printed Page

Title: City of Dragons (A San Francisco mystery)
Author/website(s): Kelli Stanley
335 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Publication date: March ’10
Genre: Historical mystery (1940)
Review book or pleasure reading: Pleasure reading
New-to-me author: Yes
Would I recommend this book: DNF’d @ pg. 113
Would I read more from this author: No
Journal notes: Pleasure reading – no review except to say this author forgot to capture my interest in her story.

February, 1940.

Gone With The Wind packs movie palaces two months after its December premiere. “Moonlight Serenade” echoes from jukeboxes all over the country. And the Sino-Japanese war still rages, while France waits anxiously for the Nazi blitzkrieg to hammer the Maginot line.

In San Francisco’s Chinatown, fireworks explode as the city celebrates Chinese New Year with a Rice Bowl Party, a three day-and-night carnival designed to raise money and support for China war relief.

Miranda Corbie—thirty-three-year-old private investigator, Spanish Civil War nurse and ex-escort, waits impatiently in the crowd. Until small-time numbers runner Eddie Takahashi stumbles into Sacramento Street and into her life … fatally shot.

The Chamber of Commerce wants it covered up. The cops acquiesce. Japanese boy in a Chinese carnival … wrong place at the wrong time.

All Miranda wants is justice—whatever it costs. From Chinatown tenements to a tattered tailor’s shop in Little Osaka, to a high-class bordello draped in Southern Gothic—she shakes down the city—her city—seeking the truth.

City of Dragons was provided to me by Bridget at Minotaur Books. I was not paid and this book is being passed along to another book blogger