REVIEW: Bad Kids (book) by Zijin Chen, translated by Michelle Deeter

Bad Kids is a Chinese thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Zhang Dongsheng, a teacher, arranges what he thinks is the perfect murder. Acting like a dutiful son-in-law, he takes his wife's parents to a nature park at a time when it's mostly deserted and pushes them off the mountain to their deaths. He'll claim it's an accident caused by his father-in-law's health condition, and since there are no witnesses, no one will be the wiser.

However, there are witnesses: three children who accidentally catch the whole thing on video. Thirteen-year-old Chaoyang and his new friends, two runaway orphans named Ding Hao and Pupu, initially think they should turn the footage in to the police. However, if they do that then Ding Hao and Pupu will be forced to go back to the orphanage where they were mistreated and nine-year-old Pupu was sexually abused. Chaoyang had briefly been letting the two orphans stay at his house while his mother was away at work, but the situation can't continue, so the kids hatch a plan to blackmail Zhang Dongsheng, who they believe must be rich because of the kind of car he drives (his wife and in-laws were rich, not him). They'll use the money they get from him to pay for food and a place to stay.

As the situation becomes more complicated, both Zhang Dongsheng and the kids have things to hide.

The cover calls this "an edge-of-your-seat bestselling Chinese suspense thriller," so I was expecting an exciting read. Instead, the bulk of it dragged. The main characters' problems kept piling up (the final body count surprised me), but it somehow never felt tense and suspenseful. The writing/translation was spare and not particularly impressive, and the characters never felt real. Chaoyang's situation was very melodramatic - although his father was well-off, he and his mother lived in poverty because his father had divorced his mother and remarried someone who wanted to pretend her husband's earlier family never existed. Chaoyang learned that his half-sister didn't even know she had an older brother, and Chaoyang's father's new wife tended to come across like a shrieking villain from a soap opera. Her method of getting revenge against Chaoyang and his mother at one point involved hiring someone to toss a bucket of human waste at them.

The "twist" ending transformed this from a mediocre read into a bad one and actively angered me. I was left with something that was neither believable nor at all satisfying.