REVIEW: The Feng Shui Detective (book) by Nury Vittachi

The Feng Shui Detective is the first book in Nury Vittachi's Feng Shui Detective mystery series. I checked it out from the library.

Review:

Mr. Wong is a feng shui consultant in Hong Kong who occasionally uses his skills for more than just interior decoration. In this particular book, he finds himself looking into multiple odd cases, including an apparent kidnapping, a ghost at a dentist's office, and a young lady who various psychic readings indicate that she will soon die.

The publisher's description makes it sound like that last case is Wong's primary focus throughout the book, but it actually takes quite a while before he becomes directly involved (unless I zoned out and missed something, which is honestly possible). One of the biggest issues I had with this book was the way it meandered, despite several supposedly time-sensitive issues.

Wong was "assisted" by his utterly useless office administrator, Winnie Lim, and his young intern, Joyce McQuinnie. A few pages after I wondered why Wong put up with Winnie, the author provided an answer (she'd made herself indispensable with an office filing system only she understood), but after her third or fourth refusal to answer the office phone, I decided replacing Winnie would probably be worth reorganizing all the files. 

Joyce was better, once the author allowed readers to learn more about her from her own POV rather than Wong's very "Westernized young people are incomprehensible" POV. She was adrift and didn't really feel like she belonged anywhere. Although her father supported her financially (which she later realized was a good deal better than nothing), he was otherwise pretty absent from her life. Wong inadvertently gave Joyce an emotional boost when he gave her his kidnapping case (mostly because he didn't think it was a real kidnapping and he just wanted it out of his hair) since she knew several of the people involved. I could see Wong and Joyce's relationship being a big part of this series' draw later on - their difficulty communicating with each other was occasionally amusing and could be even more appealing if it was combined with Wong purposely becoming a supportive figure in Joyce's life.

For the most part, the mysteries didn't really interest me, even as the connections between some of them were revealed. I did, however, enjoy the way Wong's feng shui knowledge was worked into things (although I don't know enough about feng shui to know if it was accurate) - he tended to pay close attention to architectural plans and other information that might indicate the location of water pipes and other features important to his work. Some of those parts were so practical that it was somewhat of a shock how badly Wong reacted to the Sydney Opera House and its supposedly terrible feng shui later on in the book. (And now I have questions, because some googling indicates that feng shui principles inspired the building's architecture, but the things I've seen mentioned only slightly overlap with what Vittachi brings up in this book.)

I don't see myself going out of my way to read more of this series, but if I happen to come across another one of its books, I might try it just to see if Wong and Joyce learn to mesh better.