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The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun) | 
 enlarge | Author: Eliot Pattison
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 900436
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.3 x 1.5
ISBN: 0312204787
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780312204785
ASIN: 0312204787
Publication Date: September 27, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Some wear on book from reading, we guarantee all purchases and ship all items via USPS mail.
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Amazon.com Review
Not many political thrillers are set in Tibet, and few can match the power and poetry of this debut novel by journalist Eliot Pattison. At the heart of the story is a forced labor camp where the Chinese imprison Buddhist monks and other local dissidents they've swept up since taking over Tibet. The prison also holds a few special Chinese prisoners--including Shan Tao Yun. This middle-aged man was once the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, specializing in fraud cases. For reasons even he doesn't understand, he has been imprisoned and brutalized, and now he spends his days breaking rocks high in the Himalayas on a road crew called the People's 404th Construction Brigade. Shan manages to survive under these harsh conditions thanks to the spiritual guidance of his fellow prisoners, but this precarious balance is threatened by the discovery of the headless body of a local Chinese official near a road construction site. The dead man's head soon turns up in a famous shrine--a cave that contains the skulls of heroic monks. The shrewd Red Army colonel in charge of the district asks Shan to conduct an investigation: offers of better food and conditions combined with threats against his monk friends convinces him to take on the task. Colonel Tan wants a fast resolution that imcriminates a mute, passive monk found near the cave, but Shan is certain that the man isn't guilty. More likely killers include other high-ranking Chinese officials, as well as some American mining capitalists who had personal as well as financial dealings with the dead man. By engaging his readers in a mass of details, Pattison makes us believe completely in Shan and his perilous situation--and creates a rare combination of excitement and enlightenment. --Dick Adler
Product Description
Winner of the 2001 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, Skull Mantra was a sensation when first published and received wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. The Skull Mantra was ranked with Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow as a novel as much about a people and a place--the Tibetans of the high Himalayas--as it is a gripping thriller. The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending someone high up in Beijing's power structure. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people's desperate fight for its sacred mountains and the Chinese regime's blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is innocent. Now time is running out for Shan to find the real killer.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 An engrossing mystery in a mysterious land April 16, 2001
Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
I know nothing about Tibetan Buddhism and so cannot comment on how well or poorly Pattison does at portraying the beliefs and practices of that religion, but at the very least I believe he fully succeeded in creating a convincing portrait of a culture alien both to American readers and, to a great extent, to the book's Chinese protaganist, Shan Tao Yun, a former police investigator who is now a prisoner in the 404th Construction Brigade, condemned to work on a road gang in the mountains of Tibet because he proved too honest in Beijing. There is much in Shan which inevitably reminded me of Arkady Renko of Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park" and sequels. Both Shan and Renko are driven to find the truth no matter how much their masters would prefer a more convenient solution to the crimes at hand. And Shan, like Renko before him, finds his quest for the truth becomes a path to his own moral growth. For me, the mystery, the setting, and the central characters all worked to make an absorbing tale that kept me interested to the last page.
Imperfect, but with a perfect center, like all of life. January 16, 2000
Lisa Brandt (Sacramento, CA)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
When I started to read The Skull Mantra, I was not happy with the author's apparent lack of understanding of Tibetan Buddhism, which I practice. Just having Buddhists refer to their "soul" and having them kneel to pray made me cringe, and I hated to see Tibetan Buddhist practice reduced to reciting mantras. But after finishing the book in record time (the plot left me no other choice), I wonder whether the technical errors reflect ignorance so much as an attempt to allow uninitiated readers to relate to the feelings of the characters. Where it really counts, the book faithfully represents the deeper currents of Tibetan Buddhist thought. This is especially true in the conclusion, which starkly presents the way in which different cultural backgrounds find resolutions for the same problem (I'm trying not to give too much away here!). Yes, the foreign words and concepts make the book hard to read for those who are completely unfamiliar with the background. But if you want to read a great mystery that also introduces you to a culture worth knowing and an international conflict worth knowing about, this is it.
A must-read for Hillerman Fans September 15, 1999
John Rogers ClarkIV (Hartland, ME United States)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
When I read the Booklist review a couple months ago, I knew this had the potential to be one of the more interesting books to be published this Summer. This book does for Buddhism and Tibetan culture what Tony Hillerman's books have done for Navajo and Hopi culture and mythology. I learned a tremendous amount while being intrigued and entertained. The plot is believable, the characters are quite real and the ending not easily determined in advance. Make no mistake, this isn't an easy read and you need to concentrate quite a lot at times to comprehend which characters are which, but it's well worth slogging through those points. Low violence, low profanity, very low sex and a cast of characters you really get involved with sums up this book. I don't know how Mr. Pattison could pull off a sequel, but he should definitely write more fiction.
Heavy going, but generally rewarding January 12, 2000
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
This is an engrossing story, and the author does a splendid job of bringing the setting alive. His picture of Tibet under the Chinese administration is painful to read but unfortunately accurate, and, to his great credit, he avoids the temptation to depict all Chinese officials as Bad Guys; the occupation of Tibet is shown to be painful for the more conscientious Chinese too. I found that the characters were a mixed bag: Shan and his Chinese and Tibetan partners-in-investigation were fully rounded and believable, but some of the other characters (especially the two Americans) were one-dimensional. The novel was rough going at times, too: there are long stretches where what you're reading is fascinating, but it's hard to see the relevance of it to the investigation; and although the author offers a neat resolution of the mystery at the end, some of the other possible explanations he raised were never satisfactorily resolved. As for the criticism that the novel's depiction of Tibetan Buddhism is full of errors, I'm not an expert on the subject, although I do volunteer work for a Tibetan refugee relief organization and hang around with a lot of Tibetans. But I know that it's erroneous to view Tibetan Buddhism as a monolithic whole: there are various schools of thought and monastic traditions, and the indigenous Bon religion, which preceded Buddhism, is shamanistic and magical. Westerners are usually initiated into the monastic side of Tibetan Buddhism, but the magic often looms larger in ordinary people's lives, and I think the author did a good job of showing that. All in all, the novel is rewarding, but it's not the light escapist reading that one often expects from mysteries.
 Awful! December 9, 1999
Clare Dygert (Rochester, NY)
13 out of 25 found this review helpful
As a Tibetan Buddhist and a lover of mysteries, I have to say that this is one of the worst books I have forced myself to read. There are a multitude of mistakes about Buddhist thought and especially Tibetan Buddhism. I would hate to think that anyone who read this would think they knew something about Tibetan Buddhism from this book! The characters are wooden, the plot convoluted and confusing, the pace painfully slow. Avoid this book at all costs!
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