Where Judge Dee Gets Stuck in a Monastery

The Haunted Monastery by Robert van Gulik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another entertaining book in a pretty fun series.

This one has the best setting--a long night at a rambling old Taoist monastery in the mountains, wagon wheel broken, rained in, trapped with a variety of guests to the place, with a lots of strange things happening. It was more of a cozy mystery than other titles I've read so far, though there was real danger, lots of hidden rooms, and plenty of action.

And there are some salacious bits. I'm not sure why I find that surprising. They're fine, though, nothing extraordinary, and all makes sense with the plot.

I also appreciate that it's a shorter novel, as so many used to be. Probably 60K-65K words total. Enough to finish in a few days reading at bedtime. (I still manage to get two or three characters mixed up.)

The original reason I ever looked up these books was the movies I saw on cable. There are some high budget Judge Dee movies (out of Hong Kong, I think) and they made me wonder. The movies are probably more fun than the books, with lots of supernatural stuff, but these are good, too.

Recommended for historical mystery buffs.

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