Aided by a young Kazakh woman, former Beijing police investigator Shan Tao Yun heads for a remote Tibetan plateau to investigate the murder of a venerated teacher and the susequent disappearance of a lama, but his probe is soon complicated by the resentment of local Tibetans, a sullen resistance fighter, and a dead American. By the author of The Skull Mantra. 35,000 first printing. Given the critical and commercial success of Eliot Pattison's Edgar-winning debut novel, The Skull Mantra , which painstakingly limned contemporary Tibet's harsh beauty and defiant fatalism through the stoic perspective of Shan Tao Yun, a Chinese bureaucrat imprisoned in a Himalayan labor camp, it's no wonder the author's second novel returns to this hauntingly scarred country. But Water Touching Stone also widens the author's geographical and social scope. Shan must find a killer who is stalking orphan boys in the high mountains and deserts of the Xianjiang Autonomous Region. 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 realizes he has no choice: Gendun had told him the one essential truth of the event; for the lamas everything else would be mere rumor. What they had meant was that this lama and the dead woman with a Chinese name were vital to them, and it was for Shan to discover the other truths surrounding the killing and translate them for the lamas' world. 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: On they went, three small men in the vastness of the changtang, the wind sweeping the grass in long waves around them, the snow-capped peaks shimmering in the brilliant light of dawn. As they appeared over a small knoll they surprised a herd of antelope, which fled across the long plain. Except one, a small animal with a broken horn, which stared as if it recognized them, then ran beside them, alone, until they reached the road. --Kelly Flynn Chinese ex-investigator Shan Tao Yun, who was introduced in the Edgar Award-winning The Skull Mantra, has come to the inhospitable terrain of western China to unravel the mysterious death of a popular teacher. Shan's team of allies, a remarkable array of Kazakhs, Tibetans, and others, quickly learn that the teacher's death masks others. Alas, the interference of tyrannical Chinese investigators, the hardships of the terrain, and the complexity of the interweaving plots slow Shan down despite his stunning psychological and political insights. The first half of the book moves at a meditative pace, but once the true quarry is identified, the hunt quickens and suspense mounts unbearably. As in the previous book, Shan mirrors the spirituality and peril of the Tibetan cause, while the addition of the Kazakh, Uighur, and other non-Buddhist indigenous elements makes this a compelling saga of vanishing peoples. The archaeological themes are but one of the ways Pattison demonstrates his power to evoke the desperate cataclysms that these tribes and individuals suffer. For all public libraries where the East lures readers. Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Pattison's debut, The Skull Mantra (1999), won the Edgar Award, and his second continues the adventures of his smart, courageous, and spiritually inclined hero, Shan Tao Yun. Once a high-level Beijing investigator, Shan didn't tow the Communist line and consequently endured the horrors of the Tibetan gulag. He now devotes himself to helping the Tibetans in their seemingly impossible battle for justice under China's brutal occupation. As the curtain rises, Shan is traveling in the company of a lama and various members of the Tibetan resistance, including Jakli, a young Kazakh woman of great valor. They're investigating