Although I tended not to like some of the digressions, I did enjoy reading about Beijing's odd mix of foreigners before the war.Since the 2012 publication of the bestselling Midnight in Peking, Paul French has been linked to Beijing, or at least some historical iteration of it. This expectation was not met, so I was a little disappointed. I think I approached this book with the impression that I would learn more about Beijing at the time. The author deserves tremendous credit for keeping the myriad of characters readable: whenever he brings up a minor character for a second or third time, he adds a quick tag to remind the reader what that character did previously. This book easily could be whittled down to a nice article. The author seems to have done a lot of other research that was unnecessary, such as describing weather conditions, irrelevant biographies of other 'characters,' and tangential political events happening at the time of the murder.

Almost all of the research regarding the murder comes from the father of the victim's notes. Good Read, Lots of Atmosphere, Not Much Meat (I get the difficulties in trying to parse the identities of historical figures in contemporary terms, especially when dealing with a very fragmentary sourcebase, but I was very uncomfortable with the fact that French chose to repeatedly refer to one person as a 'hermaphrodite.') ( ) And while it's entirely possible that the men whom French names here as her killers were indeed culpable, it should be noted that questions have been raised about the integrity with which he presents some of the evidence he draws on.

I'm also not sure that French convinced me that the Werner murder really does tell us all that much about 1930s Beijing, particularly since the sources he's working with are largely written from a European colonialist perspective. However, the fact that Werner's murder was (at least officially) unsolved, and that both the formal investigation and public interest in it petered out comparatively quickly means that Midnight in Peking loses momentum after about the halfway point. I'm glad that he doesn't lose sight of the tragedy of her death.

Paul French works hard to give this work of true crime the suspense and immediacy of a thriller novel, and the empathy he shows for the murder victim-Pamela Werner, just 19-is welcome. In late 1930s Beijing, the teenage daughter of a British colonial officer was brutally murdered, her body horrifically mutilated and discarded, a death horrific enough to make headlines even amid the fraught climate of a city on the verge of invasion by Japanese imperial forces.

Midnight in peking by paul french