Quite a bit of shock value throughout. I don't buy his conclusions, but enjoyed the read ( )

Well written and interesting. A compelling read. I admire the author's dedication to telling this story and his efforts at research to do such a fine job. The way he put the story together makes it read like a murder mystery, not just a retelling of the facts. ( )

Really fascinating book, equal parts history and true crime. The author vividly evokes a pungent atmosphere of multicultural pre-war Peking with terse, hardboiled, film noir-esque language. The murder mystery was never officially solved, but the conclusion drawn seems plausible. This won awards; I don;t have a problem with that. Really well written. ( )

Initially thought this was a novel, then a couple of chapters into the book realized that it was historical nonfiction. As they say, truth is often stranger (and more riveting) than fiction. ( )

In late 1930s Beijing, the teenage daughter of a British colonial officer was brutally murdered, her body horrifically mutilated and discarded, a death horrific enough to make headlines even amid the fraught climate of a city on the verge of invasion by Japanese imperial forces. Paul French works hard to give this work of true crime the suspense and immediacy of a thriller novel, and the empathy he shows for the murder victim—Pamela Werner, just 19—is welcome. I'm glad that he doesn't lose sight of the tragedy of her death.

However, the fact that Werner's murder was (at least officially) unsolved, and that both the formal investigation and public interest in it petered out comparatively quickly means that Midnight in Peking loses momentum after about the halfway point. I'm also not sure that French convinced me that the Werner murder really does tell us all that much about 1930s Beijing, particularly since the sources he's working with are largely written from a European colonialist perspective. And while it's entirely possible that the men whom French names here as her killers were indeed culpable, it should be noted that questions have been raised about the integrity with which he presents some of the evidence he draws on.

(I get the difficulties in trying to parse the identities of historical figures in contemporary terms, especially when dealing with a very fragmentary sourcebase, but I was very uncomfortable with the fact that French chose to repeatedly refer to one person as a "hermaphrodite.") ( )