An Import of Intrigue

This second volume in the adventures of Welling and Rainey adds a variety of exotic cultures into the mix: foreigners with strange customs, languages, and ways of thought—reminding me of Jack Vance, who liked to play with exotic cultures. This makes life interesting in a way, although perhaps throwing four different exotic cultures at us at once (all involved in the same case) is a bit too much to take in easily.

So far, both books in this series have described bizarre crimes that are not solved in a systematic manner, but by some flash of inspiration. I'm not a devotee of murder mysteries and my experience of them is somewhat limited, but this seems rather unsatisfactory. Ideally, I'd prefer the crime merely to appear bizarre (but in fact to be relatively straightforward), while I'd prefer the solution to be reached by systematic investigation rather than by flash of inspiration or luck.

If you're the sort of reader who tries to solve the crime before the detective does, I think these books are not for you. In this case, you could perhaps guess the murderer by luck, but I don't think you could do it by rational analysis; and there's no way you could figure out the details of how the man came to be murdered. The author isn't playing your game, he doesn't give you enough information.

The story is quite gripping. However, the frequent injuries and constant stress that our heroes endure continue to make me uncomfortable, especially as they never seem to rest and recover, but go on driving themselves into action day after day. How much of this treatment can a body take?