A light weight krimi set in Singapore. ‘Light weight’ is the kind of krimi I like. Not too serious, not too violent, not too graphic, and not too demanding on the little grey cells. I will admit of exceptions like Ross Macdonald and Georges Simenon, but they are few.
This is the first in a series focused on Aunty Lee’s home cooking restaurant in the island city-state of Singapore. Madame Lee is a woman of substance but she loves cooking and running her small restaurant for a crew of regulars since it is far off the beaten tracks in Singapore. She also has a long established and island-wide network of cronies and contacts, some of them from her late husband’s business empire. The final ingredient is her nose for news, i.e., gossip.
The fire is lit when the plastic wrapped dead body of a young woman washes up on one of Sentosa’s beaches. ‘Sentosa’ means peace and tranquility and tidal corpses do not fit the tourist board image. Sentosa also generates enormous income from the twenty million visitors a year who go to this Asian values Disney-like land.
Aunty Lee gets along well with her stepson Mark, who is unable to emulate his father’s business success, but not with his insufferable wife, Selina. She was so insufferable in the early pages I thought, applying years of viewing episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders,’ that she would be the first victim. Alas, no. Though she does largely pass out of the story, or my reflexes have improved and I managed to flip the pages upon which she appeared so quickly I did not notice. I did enjoy a smile when she reappeared toward the end, and the villain slipped her knockout drop so that we readers did have to endure more of her endless verbal and sub-verbal tirades. What’s her problem? She is rich, but not rich enough. And never will be.
Madame Lee’s crime-busting irregulars include Nina, her Filipino maid, and Sergeant Salim, a Malay Muslim, in a city of Chinese Christians and a few others as she pursues the Sentosa murderer. When the victim is identified it is someone she knew. Then there is a second…. Also known to Aunty Lee. This is too much! It’s personal!
I learned quite a bit about the legal status of guest worker maids in Singapore. Sergeant Salim’s outsider status has advantages and disadvantages, as he well knows, and he is learning to capitalise on the former, and gets a few tips from Aunty Lee about managing the latter. That maid, Nina, has her own network to bring to the table.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in the miasma that is Singapore. A major plot concerns gay couples, and coupling, in Singapore, where it is ILLEGAL! That seemed an odd foundation for the series, though it is well handled, and by the smoke and mirrors of authorship Sergeant Salim is never directly confronted with this crime.
The villain was not hard to spot for us hardened krimi readers but how he came into contact with the two women and dispatched them was neither convincing nor interesting. It also seems to me that early on we had far too much of the egregious Selina for no other purpose than the relief at her subsequent absence. She played no part in the plot. Yes, I now about the false text message but the egregious Selina was not essential to that.
Ovidia Yu
These quibbles aside, I shall certainly read the second in the series.
In my many business trips to Singapore I never made it to Sentosa. I did walk through the Raffles lobby once and shopped for underwear at the Marks and Spencer, and have since stuck to the M&S house brand via email order. I rode around on the red bus once. Loved the Aladdin’s Cave of the Mustafa Centre, especially before it got all cleaned up. Battle Box in Channing Hill was a grim reminder of the War, as was the replica Changi Chapel. [Moment of silence.]
I had a memorable Thai meal in Singapore in which I made a fool of myself. Long story. Short version: having traveled in Thailand I thought I knew Thai food. Wrong. On all my visits in Thailand the hosts always knew I was coming and all the places I stayed catered, I later realised, for the western palate. The meals in university restaurants and hotels are not the real thing. But place we went in Singapore was! I was hors de combat quick smart.
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