Ceremony of Innocence

Hawksley's background is impeachable, the subject matter relevant and timely, and Mike McKillip a character potentially worth following. Now that the Cold War is over, we need to turn eyes on the China region he knows so well. First rate.

Humphrey Hawksley who is well known as Far Eastern BBC Correspondent and more recently war correspondent in Kossovo and Timor uses his journalistic knowledge of the Far East to reveal in all too chilling and convincing detail what might be going on behind the headlines. He is one of the best informed and therefore one of the more frightening political writers around. Ceremonies of Innocence, his first solo novel, gets China right in many ways (as a Peking resident his descriptions of the streets, the bars, the corridors of government all ring true to me) and his projections of how the future might be - a cynical, sad and slowly more compromised Hong Kong, the forces of reform in a death grip struggle with the old guard in the military and the party, again ring true with the present trends as China goes through a time of great change. But Hawksley's books are not all politics: his cast of characters are real people with testing moral dilemmas,and their predicaments affect you. So do the sensual love scenes. Ceremony of Innocence and its successor Absolute Measures are superb thrillers in every way.