Urban Fantasy from a slightly different perspective: the urban setting is Hong Kong and the fantasy, as one might expect in that setting, is a Chinese pantheon including input from Buddism, Tao, and Confucianism - and a heavy dose of oriental martial arts. The heroine is a sassy Aussie, who somehow landed in Hong Kong and teaches English in a kindergarten as well as teaching a number of private clients. As her private clients move on, the father of her favorite student picks up their times so she can spend more time with his daughter. When she leaves the kindergarten, after the owner requests that she spy on her private client for her, Mr. Chen, the client, hires her full time as his daughter's nanny at such a fantastic salary that she cannot refuse, but has to wonder what is really going on.
From there we are pitched into a world of gods and demons and magic and martial arts and a child with some extraordinary gifts. There is blood and gore, and the lifestyle of the extremely wealthy, and a visit to the Paris home of Kwan Yin. We learn the true identity of Mr. Chen fairly early on, and meet a number of his colleagues, one of whom is the title character. Which seems fairly odd, because he really is not central to the story at all - unless she is carrying out an elaborate mah jongg parallel, but I don't see it in the titles of the second and third trilogies of this triple-triple.
As in the last trilogy that I started, Chan drops a number of heavy portentious hints and then stops rather abruptly - the last five percent of the book is a glossary. Perhaps it is less annoying than the last one because it isn't nearly as long. Never mind, I just checked and they only differ in length by four pages. Maybe it seemed shorter because there are not three different story lines to tie together and there is much more action.
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