Review of "On Java Road" by Lawrence Osborne

A noire-ish thriller set in post-handover Hong Kong, set against the background of the student protests of 2014, and made all the more poignant because we know, as the characters in the novel can only expect, that the protests will go nowhere and achieve nothing, but destroy the lives of many participants.

It's very atmospheric and I liked the settings and the characters, but it's rather let down by the plotting. It takes a really long time for the mystery - the disappearance of a young wealthy student protester, who is having an affair with the super-wealthy frenemy of the journalist first-person narrator - to get started. She doesn't actually disappear until two thirds of the way through the book, and after which there's a lot of suspense and threat, but not much really happens. 

I'm aware that Lawrence Osborne, the writer, has written a Philip Marlowe novel with the blessing of the Raymond Chandler estate, and I couldn't help thinking that Chandler would have got the basic scenario set up much more quickly/

So I sort of had mixed feelings about the book. But the next novel that I picked up wasn't nearly as well written, so I retrospectively like it more than I did straight after I finished it.