Review | Beijing Payback: Daniel Nieh paints a picture-perfect portrait of the Chinese capital’s gritty underbelly
- Murder mystery turned revenge tragedy moves from the comfy confines of California to the gritty city
- Fast-paced plot maintains plausibility, with extraordinary circumstances bringing out the extraordinary in its protagonists
Beijing Payback
by Daniel Nieh
Ecco
5/5 stars
Victor Li’s father is killed in an apparently random robbery at his Chinese restaurant in California’s quiet and safe city of San Dimas. Naturally, Victor is devastated. His father seemed the archetypal Chinese immigrant dad – hardworking and honest, and raised to anger only by his children’s poor grades. Then Victor starts to learn a little more about the man.
It turns out he didn’t own the chain of Chinese restaurants he managed – Beijing “interests” did. He’s left a decent-sized life insurance policy nobody knew about, as well as a suitcase deposited in a massage parlour locker with a bunch of passports, a sizeable wedge of yuan and a gun. Vincent starts to suspect his dad’s murder wasn’t so random after all.
