Ghost Month
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to Unknown Pleasures, a food stand in Taipei's night market named after a Joy Division album, and also the location for a big-hearted new mystery set in the often undocumented Taiwan.
August is Ghost Month in Taiwan—a time to pay respects to the dead and avoid unlucky omens. Jing-nan, who runs a food stand in a bustling Taipei night market, isn’t superstitious, but this August will haunt him nonetheless. He learns that his high school sweetheart has been murdered—found scantily clad near a highway where she was selling betel nuts. Beyond his harrowing grief, Jing-nan is confused. “Betel nut beauties” are typically women in desperate circumstances, but Julia Huang was high school valedictorian, and the last time Jing-nan spoke to her, she was far away, happily enrolled in NYU’s honor program. The facts don’t add up. Julia’s parents don’t think so, either, but the police seem to have closed the case without asking any questions. The Huangs beg Jing-nan to do some investigating—reconnect with old classmates, see if he can learn anything more about Julia’s last years. Reluctantly, he agrees, for Julia’s sake. But nothing can prepare him for what he is about to learn, or how it will change his life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For a guy who scoffs at the ghosts revered by so many of his fellow Taiwanese, droll everyman Jing-nan, a night-market food stall manager, ironically finds himself spending much of his time chasing one as he investigates the murder of his childhood sweetheart, Julia Huang, in this darkly comic thriller from Lin (One Red Bastard). Baffled by what the ambitious valedictorian of his Taipei high school class was doing as a skimpily clad "betel-nut beauty" hawking betel nut to truckers on a remote highway, much less by who would want to kill her, Jing-nan keeps asking questions, despite risks to his own safety. As he starts to uncover Julia's explosive secrets with the help of their spunky former schoolmate, Nancy, Jing-nan finally faces the need to let go of the past in order to build a future, which one hopes will be revealed in a sequel.
