Hong Kong Murders

I have finally finished reading Hong Kong Murders, by Kate Whitehead. It relates fourteen homicides that have taken place in Hong Kong over the years. Hong Kong is one of the safest places in the world, so I was interested to find out what these murders were. Also, it is part of research that I am currently conducting for my next novel. The murders described in the book were driven by money, sex or revenge. Some of them were linked to the famous Hong Kong triads, others to kidnapping, or even simple shootings. Whitehead goes through each case, describing the murder scene, then moving on to the inquiry, and sometimes the trials that followed. To be honest, it's not very exciting. Maybe the material itself is deficient, with Hong Kong being such a safe place, and the Chinese culture not being a violent one. Chinese will usually satisfy themselves with oral arguments and are reluctant to move on to physical fighting. One feature of Hong Kongers is that they don't like to "get involved" and don't like to mingle with other people's businesses. As a consequence of that, I was horrified to learn that an estimated forty people passed the body of a woman who had been raped and strangled before anyone called the police. Worse still, included in these forty passers-by were her neighbours! Whitehead does an okay job, but we don't really get into the murderer's heads or their families', and we often don't understand their real motives. The killings themselves are left in the dark and more emphasis is put on the inquiry. It left me with a feeling of wanting more, and not having learned enough. In fact, I feel Whitehead struggled to make the material interesting. It is obvious from the book that she has done an enormous amount of research and interviewed the protagonists, but this is not enough to make the book very exciting. Two stars.