Water Touching Stone (Paperback)

Gendun, the senior lama at the monastery that has given Shan sanctuary, announces to his student: "You are needed in the north. A woman named Lau has been killed. A teacher. And a lama is missing." Though reluctant to leave the gentle presence of the monks who are balm to his crippled soul, Shan realises he has no choice.

It turns out that Lau had taken upon herself the care of the zheli, a group of orphaned children from all corners of Xianjiang, and strove to help the children retain a sense of native identity in the face of the Poverty Eradication Scheme, which is Beijing-speak for the destruction of the herding clans and the transformation of the western steppes into a region of exploitable resources. Shan wonders whether officials from the People's Brigade (perhaps the "Jade Bitch", Prosecutor Xu Li), or the feared secret police "knobs" from Public Security decided to put a stop to her subversive activities. But when the children from the zheli begin dying amid horrific tales of the "demon" that came for them, bleak politics must grapple with darker imaginings.

The novel sports a practically Dickensian cast of characters, which might overwhelm the narrative by sheer numbers, yet Pattison manages to add depth to even the most minor of characters, and at the moments when the troupe threatens to become completely unwieldy, he deftly redeems the situation with moments of quiet poetry. --Kelly Flynn

Review
In this follow-up to The Skull Mantra, Pattison continues to transport his readers to a little-known world which compels from start to finish. Within the framework of a gripping thriller, he masterfully explores the fascinating story of the Tibetan struggle with China in all its cultural, religious and political elements. 'A woman named Lau has been killed. A teacher. And a lama missing.' Shan, a former Beijing Chinese government investigator, exiled to slave labour in Tibet for 'crimes against the state', is unofficially released to solve the mystery. It is immediately clear that these initial facts comprise only a small part of the overall picture. Children are dying and Shan, along with his travelling companions Gendum, Lokesh and Jowa, must seek and find the truth against all odds. Pattison's characters are thoroughly convincing and his grasp of detail remarkable. Gendum, 'a powerful and mysterious lama', has become like family to Shan since the Red Guard killed his father. Sensitive Lokesh, whom he met in prison, is a good and trusted friend, while Jowa, a former monk resentful of everyone and everything, is now a member of a secret Tibetan resistance group. Together they travel far in their attempts to find the killer 'on a path for which there was no map'. Given the complex cultural background and idioms of the story, at times it is easy to forget that the setting is present day. Only the mentions of helicopters and computer disks remind us that the collision of the old ways and the modern world is inevitable. The lamas are filled with fear and suspicion of what the future holds as the government in Beijing splits up the old clans and seizes yet more power. Pattison paints a picture of a country uneasy with the army and the police, where people are arrested and imprisoned for the benefit of the government. 'Maybe the old priest was right. When a sacred land got harnessed this way, it could mean the end of the world.' This is a complicated and engrossing story, both exciting and deeply moving. (Kirkus UK)

Pattison's second whodunit, once again featuring former Chinese Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun, is longer, more complicated-and, alas, more repetitious than his Edgar Award-winning debut, "The Skull Mantra "(1999). Shan, just released from a slave labor camp and now studying Tibetan Buddhism in a secret monastery, complains at several points of being lost in the forbidding wilderness just north of the Indian border. The author offers this image as a metaphor for Shan's agonizing quest to understand himself, his Chinese origins, and the terrible atrocities the Chinese government condones to break the back of the Tibetan people, but "lost" is also a regrettably apt description of how readers may feel as they try to navigate Pattison's convoluted plot. Sent as part of a delegation of monks to solve the mystery of a Tibetan teacher's murder at a distant capitalistic commune, Shan encounters a Khazakh couple carrying a dying child whom, they claim, was savagely butchered by a demon. Shan's mentor, a monk named Gendun, disappears into the wilderness, leaving Shan to explore the strange relationships among the capitalist commune, a cruel political rehabilitation camp, a group of laptop-toting resistance fighters who call themselves the Maos, a cadre of lethal Chinese soldiers, and a vengeful female prosecutor seemingly intent on persecuting as many Tibetans she can find. More corpses, including a smuggler and other children, pile up as Pattison makes too frequent use of the device that made his debut thriller so marvelous: in the most desolate, lifeless places, Shan discovers hidden caverns, buried cities, a subterranean aqueduct, even an old guided-missile silo. The bulky passages are redeemed by moments of incredible beauty, as when the corpse of the murdered teacher is found inside an ice cavern limned by the handprints ancient and modern visitors. Awkward and unsure, but animated by Pattison's fascinating overlay of Buddhist spirituality on the familiar whodunit formula. (Kirkus Reviews)

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