MYSTERY 'Dragon Bones' saved by realistic portrait of China

Liu Hulan finds love and emotional healing in a murder investigation.
By LEV RAPHAEL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Dragon Bones," by Lisa See (Random House, $24.95)
The brooding, troubled cop is a staple of crime fiction, adding psychological depth to even the thinnest whodunit. But Lisa See's Chinese detective heroine in "Dragon Bones" goes beyond the usual character cliches of divorce or alcoholism. Her Liu Hulan is a profoundly unhappy "Red Princess": the scion of a wealthy Chinese family whose power predated the communists but who had members on the Long March with Mao Tse-Tung, confirming them as communist aristocracy.
She's even named after a martyr to the cause, and so her name is instantly recognizable wherever she goes in China, just as people immediately perceive her high status in a land still riddled with hierarchies.
Living with such privilege and obligation is an intolerable burden for Liu, and she considers herself a profound failure. She's failed as a daughter because she betrayed her father during the Cultural Revolution; she's failed as a detective for China's FBI because so many people died during her last case; she's failed as a mother because she didn't rush her late daughter to the hospital soon enough.
A turn in the plot
All of this stands in the way of her reconnecting to her American-born lawyer husband, and so when they're both sent to rural China to investigate the murder of an American archaeologist, in best crime-fiction tradition she not only solves the case at the risk of her life but heals all her emotional wounds.
If it sounds overly romantic, it is, and the book ends with hoary devices: the hero trying to stage a rescue in the middle of a storm, and the psychopathic (and obvious) villain gloating endlessly about his machinations. There's even a corny line near the end about Liu and her husband beginning "the long journey home."
The real strength of this book is the absorbing portrait of China, from the bugged office of a high official to the dismal hut of a starving peasant, the kind of person who knows what it is "to eat bitterness."
This effective depiction of a modern land held emotionally and socially hostage to the past almost makes up for the dramatic failure of "Dragon Bones."