April Woo is an NYPD detective. Heather Rose Popescue is beaten
up in her apartment, and she lies comatose in hospital, while
her baby has gone missing. The doctor tells April that Heather
Rose has never given birth, so the baby cannot be her biological
child. Heather Rose’s husband Anton is a lawyer with an attitude.
When April asks Anton to explain whose the baby is, he says that
he was having an affair and his lover had the child. But he refuses
to name the biological mother, and he will not provide the birth
certificate. April’s reaction to Anton’s lack of cooperation is
to just accept it, and she pursues other leads. Now, I’m no detective,
but her failure to pressure Anton into being more forthcoming,
when the baby’s life may be at risk, seems like an obvious blunder.
I know that they’d never make those kind of mistakes on NYPD
Blue.

Maybe April’s mind is on other things: she regularly takes time
off to be with her new boyfriend, Mike Sanchez, a Hispanic NYPD
detective. They spend most of their time together in bed, where
Mike whispers hotly in Spanish to her. April feels guilty about
dating someone from a different culture, and she knows full well
that her mother, "Skinny Dragon," disapproves. Her personal
life certainly interferes with her work, and her mistakes result
in at least one person dying avoidably. It’s hard not to sympathize
with April’s boss, who is itching for her to slip up so he can
get her fired.

It seems that April’s smartest move is to ask her psychiatrist
friend Jason Frank to talk with Heather Rose. He manages to get
some response from the battered woman as she slowly emerges from
unconsciousness, and he learns of the problems in her marriage.
With both April and Heather Rose, the reader gets a sense of the
difficulties that Asian-American women face, and how it is impossible
for them to meet the demands of their parents and their peers.
The problem with Leslie Glass’s portrayal is that the psychological
insight she provides does not translate into empathetic characters,
and the same is true for the other Chinese-American women who
play integral parts in the plot. They seem to often just make
bad decisions, and as I listened to the audiobook version of this
novel, I became increasingly impatient with all the main players
in this mystery. At the very end, Glass gives some indication
that she is aware that the women in her story have a tendency
to be too passive, and she does show them also taking initiative
and learning how to be in control of their own lives. Unfortunately,
it’s too little too late, and the ending of the book is a rather
unconvincing wrap-up of enhanced self-esteem for April; given
the course of the book, it seems more likely that she would have
been demoted back to desk duty.

The reader of the audiobook,
Kathy Hsieh, has her work cut out for her, trying to convey a
wide range of accents from the New York City melting pot, and
she does a good job, although there are points where her reading
of angry male voices lacks inventiveness.

© 2001 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review.
His main research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry.
He is especially interested in exploring how philosophers can
play a greater role in public life. He is available to give talks
on many philosophical or controversial issues in mental health.

Categories: Fiction