Dragon's Eye, by Andy Oakes

Shanghai surprises as murder spoils the Party

This hardened old lag of a crime reviewer rarely feels that prickling sensation at the back of the neck, the mounting excitement that tells her she's on to a winner. I have seen too many potted biographies like Andy Oakes's: the bloke's knocked about, tried a bit of this, a bit of that, engineering, photography, youth counselling ... So now he thinks he can write.

Except, in this case, he can. Brilliantly: this is storytelling as crafted and complex as a set of Chinese boxes. The lad's got the literary bit along with it, with his lovely sinuous prose.

Dragon's Eye is set in Shanghai, which has always had its own fascination for the West: Occidental technology meets Oriental inscrutability amid the Breath of the Yellow Dragon, known west of Mandalay as early-morning smog.

Here, eight bodies, eviscerated, the eyes gouged out and the faces destroyed, are found chained together in the mud of the Huangpu river. Senior Investigator Sun Piao starts on a dangerous course. "Life no longer possesses them," is all he can get out of the official pathologist. "In China, we do not have serial killers" is the political line. Careers are made on pai-ma-pi, "patting the horse's arse". No doctor will do an autopsy; no morgue is even prepared to take the bodies.

But Piao is a stubborn man: he finds an impoverished medical student who will do an examination, a meat company that will store the corpses, and we are off on a chase that leads through archaeological sites, operating theatres, squalid bars and luxurious penthouses. One of the dead was connected with a glamorous blonde American politician, others with executions at Shanghai's dreaded Gongdelin, "Virtue Forest", prison.

Then there's a shady British surgeon and some extremely nasty, stomach-churning medical stuff; and the trail leads up through Party cadres to the highest levels.

Sundry threats, beatings and bribes fall on the heads of the unfortunate Piao and his sidekick, Yaobang – a Chinese Sancho Panza, with plum sauce and cheap beer all over his tie. In spite of rich-textured local detail, the book never feels clogged by it and the storyboard shoots rapidly on, pulling the reader irresistibly with it.

Underneath it all, Piao is that legend indispensable to crime fiction: the honest man in a den of thieves. This den happens to be a deeply complex country just attempting to open to the West, where loyalty can be bought with a packet of Marlboro and false witness with a bottle of Teachers. Yet, paradoxically, the land clings to its old beliefs.

I don't know if Oakes's picture of China is accurate, but it is something better: convincing, filled with both impressionistic atmosphere and precise detail, scents and textures, sweat and silk, mud and guns, burning charcoal and peasant food. The poor old critic's cell door suddenly opened wide after the long Christmas bang-up: Dragon's Eye is a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for the imagination.