Reviewed by Mark Schreiber Mei Wang, the Beijing-based female private investigator who made her first appearance in "The Eye of Jade" (2008), is back. Burned out by the demands of her job in the Ministry of Public Security, Mei has opened her own small "information consultancy," where she's accepted an assignment from a wealthy businessman to search for a female pop star who's gone missing, and who later turns up dead.
Like the novels of Qiu Xiaolong, another Chinese who writes mysteries in English, "Butterfly" carries plenty of political weight. Diane Wei Liang's Web site notes that as a child she spent several years with her parents in a labor camp and as a student was involved in the democracy movement that precipitated the Tiananmen Incident in June 1989.
The story begins with a prelude set in 1989 in a gulag for political prisoners in China's remote northwest. Among the detainees is Lin, convicted for demonstrating at Tiananmen. We jump forward 10 years to find that Lin has been released, but is struggling to return to an indifferent society that has left him far behind. His troubles are just beginning.