These mid-period entries around #50 are considerably better. There are still disastrous first-person chapters every so often, and knowledge about women is thin on the ground, but the humor works better than in earlier (or later) entries, and the occasional foregrounding of the Smith character makes the story work more as a buddy-comedy, with Remo and Chiun travelling together, and Smith as the straight-person.

The prose has evolved to something tolerable, and the dialogue between Remo and Chiun has reached above-average, which is fantastic compared to earlier installments. The plot is silly in a fun way, with "science" based on misunderstandings of American Scientific articles conjectured out to infinity.

I read most of it in one night, and stayed up entirely too late to do so. ( )