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Title:
Mrs Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha
Series:
Mrs Pollifax #7
Author: Dorothy Gilman
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages:
166
Words: 58K
Publish: 1985
A
good story, but ugh, two issues.
First, Mrs Pollifax is kidnapped and tortured. I was not happy with having that in this series. I don’t like women being tortured and I really don’t like older women being tortured. It wasn’t graphic, but the very idea really blunted my enjoyment.
Second, once again, was Gilman’s deliberate blind eye to how evil the Chinese Communist Party was/is. This story revolves around the silent civil war that went on between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek after their deaths. The Nationalists (led by Kai-shek) were not good people. They were corrupt and despotic, like any other tyranny. Gilman focuses on that, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My problem is that she deliberately turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Zedong and the Communists. Much like in “Mrs Pollifax on the China Station”, Gilman sounds more like a propagandist for the Communists than anything else. I can’t turn a blind eye to that. I wondered about looking more into this, but so far, most of the time when I look into an author’s personal life, it doesn’t turn out well. I think I’ll save that for when I’ve finished the “Mrs P” series.
The story itself is filled with exciting twists and turns and Mrs P once again mostly figures things out using her outsiders perspective. Since she is now married, that adds a bit of tension as we get things from her husband’s perspective as well. Given that she was tortured and almost killed, and given how her superior (an agent named Carstairs) reacted to that, I don’t see how Mrs P won’t be forcibly retired. If I was her husband, torture is where I would draw the line. So I’m looking forward to how that conundrum is going to be solved, since we’re only at the halfway mark of the series :-D
★★★✬☆
From Wikipedia.org
Mrs. Pollifax flies on a moment's notice to Hong Kong, to contact Sheng Ti, whom she met in an earlier book, and find out what is going on at Feng Imports where Sheng Ti is working for an agent named Detwiler. Detwiler's reports to the CIA have proved to be false, so he is suspected of being a counterspy and giving evidence to the enemy. Mrs. Pollifax meets some other interesting characters, including a psychic and another old friend, who is a reformed cat burglar, while in pursuit of the truth about Feng Imports. She is captured and tortured, but prevails as always.
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