Description
Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. To connect crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox.
"The China of old, in Mr. van Gulik's skilled hands, comes vividly alive again." - Allen J. Hubin, New York Times Book Review "If you have not yet discovered Judge Dee, I envy you that initial pleasure.... For the magistrate of Poo-yang belongs in that select group headed by Sherlock Holmes." - Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times"
Robert van Gulik (1910 - 67), a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture, drew his plots and literary conventions from the popular detective novels that appeared in seventeenth-century China.