Paper Son by S. J. Rozan

Pegasus Books, 352 pages, $25.95

S. J. Rozan is great at giving us a cultural look at the Chinese in America. Usually her stories are set in New York City and the Chinese viewpoint is set in Chinatown. This time her leading characters, private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, venture to the South. Kentuckian Bill Smith gets to reactivate his southern charm, and Lydia gets to feel like a trout out of aquatic fluid.

S. J. Rozan began her series with “China Trade” in 1994. In “Paper Son,” Lydia is still a youthful 28 years of age. (Ah, literary time stoppage!) Her world may have gone from the electronics-simple 1990s to the plugged-in 2010s, but Lydia (28 and Chinese) and Bill (40-something and white) are still the perfect foils and companions for each other, and that is timeless. Rozan used to alternate between telling stories from Lydia’s and then Bill’s viewpoint. In this case it's a writer showing off her strong writerly muscles, because it's so well done.

To Lydia’s very Chinese mother, family is everything. When a distant relative is murdered in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and his son is accused of being his killer, Mama Chin puts on the full-court press to get Lydia to go down South and tidy things up.

Oh, and take that “White Baboon” with you! You mean Bill? My goodness! That for Mama Chin is a serious rapproachment towards a man she has deemed unfit to clean her daughter’s shoes. Lydia and Bill have danced around a relationship for … forever. Could this be a turning point?

Back to the main event. Twenty-three-year-old Jefferson Tam is a slackard with (apparently) serious hacking chops. His father, hardworking Leland Tam, owned a small-town grocery store. Jefferson claims to have found his father dying from stab wounds on the floor of the store. The sheriff arrests Leland, whose fingerprints are all over the knife. People posing as county workers arrive to transfer Jefferson to another facility but instead break him out of jail. So the question is: Where is Jefferson?

Lydia has come down to exonerate Jefferson, not to help locate him, but that is the first order of business. While interviewing the very Southern Chinese “uncle,” Pete Tam, about his nephew (Leland) and great-nephew (Jefferson), Lydia learns a little more about the nature of Chinese grocery stores, their place in the history of the South, and the Tam family acculturation in particular. It’s fascinating.

There’s moonshine, meth, black-white relations, The Law, and other Southern tropes which Rozan nods at. She y’alls, ma’ams, and sirs. But at the heart, she doesn’t do it to make fun of the South but to add depth to her story about families, communities, and loyalty in an area with its own set of particularities.

I love the Chin/Smith books, but in “Paper Son,” I found the family trees a little leafy (take notes) for such a compressed space and one of the crucial explanations about Tremaine McAdoo left a little dangling. However, I am satisfied and happy to have read another Lydia Chin book.