Dear Great Book Guru,  With the coming of Fall, my friends and I  have resolved to broaden our reading- We want to explore other lands, other cultures in fast paced novels.  Where shall we begin? Eager Learners

Dear Eager Readers,  Last week I  read a book I think you will find just right: BEIJING PAYBACK by Daniel Nieh. The novel opens with Victor Li and his sister Jules meeting with their father’s attorney to discuss his estate. College student Victor has led a very comfortable life in the suburbs of Los Angeles - a basketball player with many good friends, a beautiful home, and a devoted sister. But all this changes when his father is found murdered and Victor discovers he was not a simple restaurateur but a smuggler and part of a vast international crime syndicate. He is left with enigmatic instructions to return to Beijing where he quickly becomes embroiled in a glamorous world of glitz, intrigue, and incredible violence. We go back in time to China’s leanest Communist years and the horrors of his father’s childhood. As a way to escape, he and his friends joined together to form this criminal enterprise which continues to the present, resulting in his murder.  Throughout the novel, Victor reminds himself of advice his father gave him - now all the more important - as he travels in both worlds his father inhabited.   He (and the reader) is faced with moral quandaries as he confronts the roots of his privileged immigrant experience. Highly recommended!