"The Rage of Plum Blossoms A well written mystery and one with a fairly convincing plot. These are things I look for in reading-for-entertainment and find all too rarely. Having said that, I find myself wondering why I found it as entertaining as I did.

I believe it was because I actually liked the characters, in spite of the fact that the circumstances of their lives are very different from mine and not the sort that I desire at this point in my life. It occurs to me that they are people who would have attracted me more when I was younger, when the very fact of being affluent, of a certain kind of life-style which appeared to be ‘sophisticated’, seemed to promise something I very much desired but could not name. I now think that elusive ‘something’ is what they call ‘glamour’.

It was their individual enthusiasms which made them attractive, even though only two of them had a particular enthusiasm with which I could identify (a serious capability in a difficult foreign language). The primary commonality between the protagonist and one major character was a passionate interest in perfumes and gossiping about clothes. Another character was an ex-cop who was passionately interested in the mystery. The mystery brought them all together, but (apart from not even a shadow of financial stress) they had nothing else in common as a group. They liked each other, but the group they formed lacked any kind of ‘political correctness’. The lack of any form of political correctness is a vision of social life that has always been elusive for me, but seems to have disappeared entirely in the past few decades. The contrary vision was actually referred to, in one of its forms, in this book when one of the characters referred to the ‘rule’ of ‘never wearing white after labor day’. My mother’s insistence on that rule has horrified me to this day.

The book held my attention throughout, and only faltered a little when the description of Halloween costumes went on longer than I liked and began to feel just a little too silly. By and large, this is one of the two best mysteries I have read in years."