Product Description

Shanghai, 1926: a sultry city lousy with opium, warlords, and corruption at the highest levels. Into this steamy morass walks Richard Field, an idealistic Brit haunted by his past and recently appointed to the international police. He’s not there long before called to the flat of a Russian prostitute, former daughter of privilege found sadistically murdered, handcuffed to her bed. When he discovers among her possessions a cryptic shipping log, he senses that this murder is more than a random crime of perverse passion. What unfolds is a searing story that propels Field into a confrontation with the city’s most ruthless and powerful gangster, and a dangerous attraction to another salacious Russian whose sordid connections seem destined to make her the next victim. Scintillating and subtle, The Master of Rain is a marvelous debut.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #345240 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-06
• Released on: 2003-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.com Review
Tom Bradby's third novel (though his first to be published in the U.S.) is a feverish work of historical noir, a labyrinthine thriller set in a vicious world where everyone--as in Bogart's Casablanca--has a reason for hiding. The year is 1926; the city is Shanghai, a swamp of organized crime, corruption, turf wars between British intelligence and street-level law enforcement, Communist sympathizers, and East European refugees from Bolshevik atrocities. Into this sweltering, cutthroat port city steps Richard Field, an idealistic policeman from Yorkshire looking to distance himself from a painful past. Ill-suited to Shanghai's heat and shocking violence, Field nevertheless throws himself into investigating the grisly murder of a Russian prostitute, the latest in a line of dead women who lived in the orbit of a powerful Chinese mobster. Slowed by official roadblocks, Field learns that the only man in his department he can trust is a tough Chicago detective, Caprisi, a touchstone of sanity even as Field loses his rookie head over another doomed Russian call girl.

Bradby, a seasoned correspondent for Britain's ITN television network, has obviously spent considerable time researching 1920s Shanghai. His feel for the city's Byzantine society and exotic textures is matched by his accessible vision of Shanghai as a junction of international fallout and internal intrigue. Less compelling, if not outright distracting, is Bradby's more contemporary emphasis on ghastly serial killings with a sex-crime edge. But in the end, the book's remarkable prose and density of experience are uniquely rewarding. --Tom Keogh

From Publishers Weekly
British TV newsman Bradby used his time in Hong Kong to do some research on 1920s-era Shanghai, the result of which is this hefty first novel of corruption, debauchery and decaying colonialism. Richard Field, a young policeman from Yorkshire, lands a job in the Special Branch of Shanghai's police department circa 1926. Honest but naeve, the Englishman falls into a snake pit of corruption and rivalry, revealed when a Russian prostitute is savagely murdered by a maniac. The trail leads to local gangster "Pockmark" Lu Huang, a powerful opium smuggler; when evidence begins disappearing and mysterious cash deposits are made to his bank account, Field knows the department is dirty, but can't get support from anyone except his sidekick Caprisi (a pugnacious American transplant who cut his teeth fighting Capone in Chicago). What's more, Field falls hard for the dead Russian's neighbor, Natasha Medvedev, who is one of "Lu's girls" and therefore, as Field discovers, highly likely to meet a fate similar to her neighbor's, which Field learns is only one in a string of such homicides. But when Field's investigation threatens Lu's opium ring, Lu lashes out at the foreign police force and the body count rises precipitously. The novel works better as a multilayered mystery than as a period piece, as the background historical issues are obscured by the more modern focus on frenzied sex and death. Likewise, the obvious film noir look the author goes for is undermined by the late 20th-century serial-killer shtick he injects into the plot. Despite the periodic glimpse of Western elitism and building Chinese sympathy for communism, there is remarkably little use of local color (language, food, local customs) to satisfy readers of historical thrillers, though the mystery plot doesn't disappoint. Major ad/promo; author tour.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A foreign correspondent for British TV's ITN, Bradby takes on Shanghai in 1926, where an English cop discovers that he is not supposed to solve the murder of a young Russian woman.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Four hundred pages of unrelenting tension....
I was totally caught up in "The Master of Rain." For hundreds of pages I shared with the young hero the confusion of literally not knowing what was going on, who if anyone could be trusted. I've read the publishers' reviews Amazon has posted, and know that they criticize the book for flawed/hackneyed writing in spots and for a failure to capture Shanghai's atmosphere in any detail. But for me, Tom Bradby did a fantastic job of capturing the atmosphere of the EXPATRIATE's Shanghai, quite a different matter, and sustaining an almost unbearable tension to the very last paragraph. This is one gripping book!!

a gripping, haunting and compelling read
Reading "The Master of Rain" is a bit like immersing yourself in a really good and gripping black and white American noir flick from the '40s. The ingredients are all there: a prostitute is found brutally murdered, and the young policeman (Richard Field, fresh off the boat from Yorkshire) assigned to this his first major murder case, is determined to prove himself and to discover who perpetrated this heinous crime, no matter what. But then there is the complication of the murdered woman's beautiful neighbour (Natasha Medvedev), with whom Field finds himself perilously drawn to, and who has her own share of painful and dangerous secrets to hide...

Field soon finds himself trying to navigate through waters he doesn't quite understand. To begin, the police department (a multinational concern) is split up into two rival departments -- Special Branch that deals mainly with the communist threat, and the Criminal Division which deals with all other types of crime, like murder, theft, etc -- that are at odds with each other. Neither division quite trusts the other, and each suspects the other of consorting with the local crime lord, Lu Huang. Field has been assigned to Special Branch, but finds himself seconded to the Criminal Branch for the duration of this investigation into the murder of Lena Orlov. The ritualistic and savage manner with which the murder was carried out suggests that the murderer has struck before, and that he will strike again. In the face of public apathy (after all the victim was only another Russian prostitute), Field soon finds that his only allies to solving this murder happen to be the two detectives he's currently working with, Caprisi and Chen. But the more they investigate, the more evidence they uncover of corruption and criminal activity. No one seems above board. Alone in a land whose politics and culture he doesn't quite understand, and finding himself being constantly advised by everyone to trust no one, and to be careful of what his actions will wrought, Field soon finds himself even beginning to doubt both Caprisi and Chen. As one character in the book states, people come to Shanghai to either escape their past, or else to enrich themselves. Can Field afford to trust his partners? And will they be able to apprehend Lena Orlov's murderer before he strikes again? Or will this crime, like so many others, be swept under the rug of political expediency? And what of Natasha? Is she as ignorant as she claims of Lena's comings and goings? Or is she hiding something? With his own share of personal demons that he has to contend with, Field is nevertheless determined to discover who this serial killer is, and to put an end to his reign of terror.

This is definitely the mystery novel of the year (so far anyway). What a fantastically engrossing read! While the novel does unfold in a rather slow and circular manner, Tom Bradby had done an excellent job of steeping "The Master of Rain" with ambiance and atmosphere, that reading every single word so that I got every nuance, seemed terribly important. I thought that the authour had done a really good job of bringing Shanghai of the 1920s -- the sights and sounds as well as the political, social and economic realities -- to life. I also thought that Bradby had done a wonderful job of depicting and bringing to life all the characters in this novel -- esp the torn and tormented Fields. All in all, "The Master of Rain" is a rich and haunting novel not to be missed.

Mystery at its best!
What a page turner! Very much reminded me of the excitement present in Caleb Carr's work. This book abounds with all of the ingredients that make up a good murder mystery: politics, greed, and sex. Set in Shanghai during the 20's, Bradby brings the reader on a journey of intrigue and fast paced drama. You will walk away with a keen sense of the social climate of China before it fell to Communism but you will not quite understand how you got it, for the message is subtle. Bradby does not drown you with pages of detail but gently weaves it through out the story.
Not knowing much of China myself, I felt a weird sense of sympathy for the country and could almost see the purpose that communism served there. Through his diverse characters, you will obtain insight into the impact of foreigners on the country, the division of classes within its borders, the skin trade, drug smuggling, and the brutality inherent in organized crime.
A brilliant book! A history lesson on a subject rarely talked about with the bonus of a solid mystery. A little slow in starting out but stick with it, once it takes off it is worth it.