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The Untouched Crime by Chinese author, Zijin Chen, is the result of my first BL-opoly roll; having never read a mystery novel set in China, I was excited to try this one. The book starts off with the discovery of a dead body, and for the officers working the case, it is easy to tell that the unfortunate man is the fifth victim of the serial killer they have been hunting over a three-year period.
“Every detail is exactly the same as the last four cases. The weapon was found in the grass about five hundred yards away from the body. It was a jump rope, like those used for PE class. There were fingerprints on the wooden handles. The killer attacked from behind, strangling his victim with the rope. Once dead, he put a Liqun cigarette in the victim’s mouth and left a white piece of paper with the words ‘Come and get me’ printed on it. We have already collected that evidence.”
While The Untouched Crime is categorized as a mystery on Goodreads, I don't consider it to be so; or maybe I should say that the mystery I got is not the mystery I expected or was hoping for. By a quarter way through, the mystery element was all but gone as you could tell fairly easily who the serial killer was, though the motivation was still unclear.
After the fifth victim is discovered, there is another death and another team investigating. Soon enough the two teams join up, and the book seems to fizzle not long after that. What comes next between the character groups is mostly repetitive, one going over and over mostly the same investigative ground or the other discussing again and again how to delude the police.
In addition to this repetition, the book is heavy on dialogue which is quite wooden; it lacks emotion and reads like a dubbed low-budget action movie (minus the action =P). It also could do with more editing; I don't remember actual typos but there are sentence construction issues. To be fair, this is a translated work, so maybe that accounts for some of it.
While not as exciting as I was hoping it to be, the ending was unexpected, which salvaged the book just a little. Not that I liked the ending, but the fact that it even managed to surprise me after everything else counts for something.
