The Skull Mantra (Hardcover)

Once, Shan was the brightest investigator of financial corruption in Beijing; he asked the wrong questions and is serving an indefinite sentence in a labour brigade in Tibet where he has learned to love and revere the ageing monks who toil beside him. When the local prosecutor is found without his head, Shan is pulled from his barracks and obliged to investigate.

"On what grounds do you refuse, Comrade Prisoner?"

Shan did not reply. On the grounds that I cannot lie for you, he wanted to say. On the grounds that my soul has been worn to thin threads by people like you. On the grounds that the last time I tried to find the truth for someone like you I was sent to the gulag for my trouble...

Tan slowly drained his tea and shrugged. "Still, you are not permitted to refuse."

With Prosecutor Jao the fourth senior official to be killed, is there a Tibetan nationalist conspiracy? Or are the monks right to fear the return of Tamdin, demon of protective vengeance? And what is the role of the American geologists Rebecca and Kincaid? Shan is determined to find the truth before the army starts shooting his labour brigade, but wherever he turns he finds himself caught up in the contradictions of Chinese rule and his own conflicting loyalties...

This is a powerful and moving thriller whose polemic against Chinese rule in Tibet and admiration for the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism never takes over from breakneck tension and the slow deliberate unravelling of a complex and ingenious plot. The more we read, the more we are caught up in the cold chill of high plateaux and betrayal; we learn with Shan to trust nobody, and be surprised by unlikely virtue. --Roz Kaveney

Debut thrillers are ten a penny, and it's a plucky reader who can plough their way through them all. But Pattison's remarkable piece is one that demands to be noticed amidst all the competition, as his complex narrative (owing not a little to Eco's The Name of the Rose, and none the worse for that), has both a heady plot, lashings of atmosphere and a strong investigator in veteran police Inspector Shan Tao Yun. A headless corpse is found by a prison work gang on a windswept Tibetan mountainside. The right man to solve the case is clearly the wily Shan, but he is somewhat inconvenienced by having to serve an indefinite sentence in the gulag for offending the party in Beijing. Against his better judgement, the district commander is obliged to release him to tackle the murder before a US tourist delegation arrives. And before long, Shan is knee-deep in political intrigue, Tibetan sorcerers, corrput party officials and even the Buddhist resistance movement. As well as the perfectly handled thriller elements, Pattison freights some serious political points into his ambitious narrative, and this is the sort of book that has one eagerly awaiting the second outing from its tyro writer. (Kirkus UK)

Pattison debuts with this superb whodunit that leads an alienated Chinese detective to a cabal of hypocritical bureaucrats, meditating monks, and meddlesome Americans in contemporary Tibet. Serving an indefinite prison term in a Tibetan slave-labor camp for having embarrassed a high-ranking Party minister, former Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun is compelled by Colonel Tan, the fastidious Party boss of a remote county, to fabricate a report. The report will explain to Beijing the inexplicable murder of the local prosecutor, whose decapitated corpse was found buried near a road that must be completed before the American tourist season. The Buddhist monks in the camp, though, would rather be tortured or shot than work on a road where the prosecutor's "hungry ghost" is lurking, especially since they believe the murder was committed by Tamden, a supernatural demon bent on avenging Chinese persecution. Shan knows that failure to appease the Party's perverse sense of justice would make things only worse for the Tibetan people, whose religious faith he yearns to understand. Like Arkady Renko in Gorky Park, Shan finds that his effort to hide the truth paradoxically leads him to buried secrets within the Party hierarchy itself - secrets hidden in ancient Tibetan caves in an American mining project whose naive scientists claim to want only what is best for Tibet. Alternately thwarted and helped by Yeshe, a brainwashed former monk, and by a cynical Chinese prison guard, Shan develops a marvelously complicated vision of an intricate, defiantly fatalistic nation inseparable from the beautifully bleak landscape that has shaped it. He also discovers a surprising dignity and compassion in some of his fellow Chinese, who remain enslaved to the venalities of leaders past and present. Breathlessly suspenseful tour of a dangerous and exotic landscape, where opposing forces, political and magical, give way to ah eerie, mystical truth. (Kirkus Reviews)