In Citizen One, the second of Andy Oakes' Sun Paio series, the detective emerges from the state detention system bruised and battered, both physically and mentally.

It is, perhaps, the pain of his incarceration that drives Sun into one deadly situation after another, leaving his career and often his life hanging by a thread, as he takes on the big boys in China's warped power structure.

A death wish is just one of the many sad results of his detention.

Against the judgment of those higher up, that of his peers and sometimes, it seems, the better wishes of Sun himself, the detective investigates a series of horrific murders of young women. The victims are subjected to grisly torture before being put to death amid an orgy of sex and violence. They're then entombed in concrete at the fictional New National Stadium in Shanghai. Sun delves ever deeper into the power structure of the old guard and the new power and their progeny who compete to run the show in modern China, well out of reach of the justice system. As he risks all for himself and his long-suffering sidekick, the Big Man, Sun discovers just how high up the corruption goes.

From there, wider issues of global geopolitics against a backdrop of Islamic terrorism and a violent global underworld unravel. Eventually, it emerges that there's more to this story than China and

its proclivities.

Sun's obsession with justice runs him up against the authorities, who aren't wholly blameless in the crimes. On the surface, then, this is a conventional thriller containing the requisite graphic violence - including the now overdone use of a horrific death in the opening pages.

But Oakes has managed something more with Citizen One, which reaches above the plane of generic thriller to expose China's underbelly. He has done his homework and makes good use of 'fact chapters' outlining China's Machiavellian customs and mechanisms of control. The story resonates.

He also humanises China's dark side. In taking his protagonist straight out of one of the secret psychiatric hospitals, known as Ankang, used as detention centres for political dissidents, he puts a human face on its human rights record. Sun trails the human rights violations he has suffered with him throughout the book and they permeate the narrative. This makes for uncomfortable reading.

Had Oakes lent a little more substance to the players the journey would have been a more fulfilling one. Sun is never entirely convincing in his motives, nor does the reader warm to him. He remains an enigma. Sun's 'Tonto', the Big Man, never truly engages and it's not clear why he's prepared to risk all in the interests of this scarred and morose investigator.

The villains are too predictably evil and Sun's love interest is obscure and vague, leaving some confusion about the nature of the relationship.

But with a plot weaving in the Beijing Olympics, human rights, labour camps, murder, corruption, media censorship and geopolitical intrigue, albeit with the occasional narrative contrivance, Oakes succeeds in pulling together many of the more contentious issues surrounding China today. In doing so he does China watchers and thriller readers a service.