‘Last Days in Shanghai:’ Thriller plies tensions between U.S., China

Counterpoint Press, 250 pages, $26

Slimy all-American graft oozes from beneath the economic aspirations of contemporary China in the witty, illuminating thriller “Last Days in Shanghai.”

Casey Walker’s impressive debut novel is a post-millennial noir thriller in which the grubbier impulses of two superpowers intersect with life-altering results. Among the lives being altered is that of Luke Slade, a casually cynical young man condemned to endure ridicule and abuse from his boorish boss, U.S. Rep. Leonard Fillmore, R-Calif., alias “Leo the Lyin’,” who’s dragged him along on some vaguely defined weeklong mission to the People’s Republic of China.

On the second day, Luke loses the congressman, a professed born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic, in an all-night bender and must go in his stead to a rural province to discuss a major development deal. Somehow, Luke walks away from a meeting with the province’s mayor with a briefcase full of American cash.

Luke suspects he’s been left “holding the bag” in more ways than one, and he frantically wanders from Beijing to Shanghai and back again trying to figure out what game he’s unwittingly playing and who’s pulling the strings. (It would also help if he could find his congressman, who’s still missing in action.)

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Luke becomes the prime suspect in the murder of the mayor who dropped the bribe on him in the first place. The storyline grows murkier as Luke’s week from hell gets worse. But as is often the case with quality American literary thrillers, what happens is ultimately less interesting than what’s in the background; in this case, detailed and tautly rendered tours of both the smoggy physical landscape of 21st-century China and the even mistier psychological terrain of an aimless American forced to negotiate a clear path between risk and responsibility.

Though its observations about China’s construction boom and the dismal state of American politics are as fresh as the morning news feed, Walker’s novel also feels like a disquieting peek deep into the coming decades of global economic upheaval.

From kirkusreviews.com