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Judge Dee - The Monkey & the Tiger
Robert Van Gulik
148 pages, 185 x 125 mm, ISBN - 9971490129
black & white illustrations
Price - S$14.90 Availability - out print
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'The Morning of the Monkey', the first of the two Judge Dee stories in this volume, takes us back to the year A.D. 666, when Judge Dee was a district magistrate. It describes one day in his busy life and tells how, early in the morning, a gibbon drew his attention to the particularly puzzling murder of an old tramp, and how, late that afternoon, he solved the riddle, assisted by his lieutenant Tao Gan. There weren't many clues to work with: four cut-off fingers and a golden ring.
The scene of 'The Night of the Tiger' is set ten years later in the winter of A.D. 676, when the Zodiac Sign of the Tiger was in the ascendant. Judge Dee was travelling from Pei-chow in the barren north to the imperial capital, where he had been appointed Lord Chief Justice, when floods obliged him to stay overnight in a spooky old country house. There he solved, all alone, the case of the inhuman cold-blooded murder of a young girl.
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