The Killing Room is an artfully crafted suspense thriller featuring a Chinese detective and an American pathologist. The crime is unusual but has distinct influences from modern global culture. We are given someone to suspect early on, and increasing reason to so suspect as the novel unfolds. What actually happens, of course, you'll need to read to discover.
This novel takes place in Shanghai, although the Chinese detective is based in Beijing. Presumably, other novels in the series happen in Beijing. Evidence of the Chinese environment is plenty, although I would not rank this among the top novels for gaining a flavor of the host culture.
This was a genuinely thrilling read, but what bothered me a bit as I read it was a hint of formula. In fact, it was in analyzing what I meant by this that led me to the discovery that there really is a formula for such novels.
The key ingredient is a love interest. A cynic might suppose that because most readers of such books are female, this is a primary necessity. I rather think it is a human necessity. The writer who to me most represents successful thriller fiction in the modern era is John Le Carre, and no one in his wildest imagination would call Le Carre a romantic writer. He's probably written books in which no women play any role at all. But Smiley had his Ann, and every successful detective novel has the central character either in love or remembering a past love.
What is essential, I have come to feel, is that feature of a story add some necessary human aspect to the character(s) but not overpower it! In The Killing Room, the love story often overpowers the murder story and, frankly, neither male nor female gains a great deal of reader empathy from it. Every now and again, we find ourselves rooting for the criminal, rather secretly hoping that he will put us out of our misery by putting the lead characters out of theirs.
I'm going to think more about how authors have dealt with this seemingly necessary complication to a plot, but I certainly don't want to claim that the great emphasis on the relationship between the two primary characters ruins the story for me. Let's just say it was an annoyance.
Another aspect of formula that interests me concerns the fact that the non-Chinese character is American. What I think odd about that is that the author is a Scot and lives in France. I'm not aware (after little thought) of another series that violates the author's knowledge base in this way. If the US is not in fact the primary purchaser of this (any?) kind of novel, then I'm way off base. I find that a personal preference I have is to learn something about what goes on in the author's head by seeing what he puts into the head of his characters. We know best the world in which we've grown up or live, and I suspect that choosing an American character when your environment has not provided one is probably less effective than putting "your own people" into the spotlight.
It's a minor point, and one that had no effect on me at all as I read the novel. It was afterward, when thinking about the relative weight of the love interest that the concept of formula appeared to me, and I wonder whether writing to a particular audience is part of that formula.