A Review of Daniel Nieh’s Beijing Payback (Ecco, 2019).

[xiomara]

A Review of Daniel Nieh’s Beijing Payback (Ecco, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Let me just say: Daniel Nieh’s Beijing Payback… I loved it. One of the most entertaining reads of the year, and certainly one of the strongest noirs I have ever read. It’s one of those books that stayed with me long after the last page. I went online and checked out to see if Nieh had anything else already cooking and whether or not there would be more installments with this protagonist. In any case, let’s get you some information from the HarperCollins website:

“A fresh, smart, and fast-paced revenge thriller about a college basketball player who discovers shocking truths about his family in the wake of his father’s murder. Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder, and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits that he was never just a restaurateur—in fact he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred. He enlists his growing network of allies and friends to finish what his father started, no matter the costs.”

This rather pithy description already gets us into about one-third of the way through the novel. The opening establishes what seems to be a rather pedestrian life: Victor’s grown up in relative privilege alongside his sister Jules. Victor and Jules are both of mixed-race background; their mother dies while they are relatively young (from cancer). At some point, a shadowy, slick figure named Sun arrives giving Victor and Jules more information than they want to know. Victor is convinced that he must travel to Beijing to figure out who killed his father and enact a form of revenge. When Victor gets to China, things get pretty hairy pretty fast. He begins to learn about his father’s time as part of that crime syndicate, and the fact that there were considerable fissures within the group. While Victor’s father retained one loyal ally (a crime boss by the name of Ai), he had made at least two other significant enemies over the handling of a possible smuggling operation (purportedly or at first thought to be concerning ketamine… we discover that the smuggling involved something else entirely by the novel’s end). The reason why Nieh’s novel is so successful is that you’re totally enmeshed in Victor’s point-of-view. You generally feel as clueless as he does about who to trust, but you always believe in his earnestness and desire to find out more about his family and his background. Nieh is also devastatingly talented at character development. He brings in letters and key dialogic interplays to give us a sense of the murky world that Victor inhabits. And, of course, you’re entirely prepared for the conclusion, something that Nieh has been patiently and logically planning the entire time, but when it hits, you’ll understand the very messy dynamics that make for families and their alternative kinships. A true can’t miss summer read. Bring it with you to the pool, to the beach, on the plane, on the train…

For more on this book, go here:

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062886644/beijing-payback/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu