Death Doesn’t Forget
Jing-nan, owner of a popular night market food stall, is framed for a string of high-profile murders—why does it seem like he’s always the one left holding the skewer? The fourth entry to Ed Lin’s Taipei mystery series is as hilarious and poignant as ever.
Taipei is rocked by the back-to-back murders of a recent lottery winner and a police captain just as the city is preparing to host the big Austronesian Cultural Festival, which has brought in indigenous performers from all around the Pacific Rim to the island nation of Taiwan. Jing-nan, the proprietor of Unknown Pleasures, a popular food stand at Taipei’s largest night market, is thrown into the intrigue. Is he being set up to take the rap, or will he be the next victim? The fallout could jeopardize Jing-nan’s relationship with his girlfriend, Nancy, who is herself soon caught up in the drama, and is increasingly annoyed at Jing-nan’s failure to propose to her.
Jing-nan also has to be careful not to alienate his trusty workers Dwayne and Frankie the Cat, who are facing their own personal trials. Dwayne struggles to reconnect with his roots as a person of aboriginal descent, while septuagenarian Frankie helps a fellow veteran with dementia, intertwining stories that illuminate decades of Taiwanese history.
Jing-nan, meanwhile, has to untangle the mystery of the killings while keeping his food stall afloat against hip new competition. Both his life, and his Instagram follower count, hang in the balance.
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The crime novel is, by its nature, a social novel.
Among its most necessary characters is setting, which functions not as backdrop but milieu….What differentiates “Death Doesn’t Forget” is its sense not of despair but of equanimity. The future is unwritten, in other words; it must be lived to be revealed. Even as the novel reaches its conclusion, Lin leaves open a number of questions about what will happen, what the characters will choose. In part, this is a convention of the series, since everyone must live to animate another book. But that’s too reductive for what Lin has done here, which is to write a crime novel as a slice of life. “It’s like any other job,” Frankie tells his wife when she wonders what it’s like to operate at the edges of the law. “It’s mostly mundane, but once in a while, it’s someone’s birthday and you get a slice of cake.”
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— David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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There is a marvelously mordant quality to Ed Lin’s novels, which combine depictions of the darkest criminality with a sense of the absurd.
DEATH DOESN’T FORGET (Soho Crime, 278 pp., $27.95) is the fourth book to feature Jing-nan, who owns a stand in Taipei’s Shilin Night Market. Here he’s facing his most troublesome situation yet, all because of who happened to win the lottery: a shiftless and peripatetic man named Boxer, who proceeds to blow most of the payout in a bar. This is unfortunate because Boxer owes half of it to Su-lien, Jing-nan’s girlfriend’s mother. Not long after Su-lien drafts Jing-nan to collect the funds, Boxer is found dead. Jing-nan is summarily (and brutally) interrogated by a police captain all too happy to pin the murder on him.
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— Sarah Weinman, The New york times
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The first sentence of “Death Doesn’t Forget,” Ed Lin’s fourth entry in his Taipei Night Market series, delivers this jolt of foreshadowing:
The first sentence of “Death Doesn’t Forget,” Ed Lin’s fourth entry in his Taipei Night Market series, delivers this jolt of foreshadowing: “On the morning of the last full day of his life, Boxer pulled the corner of the 7-Eleven sales receipt flat onto the desk with his thumbs and index fingers.” …. Life itself is often perplexing for the varied cast of this inventively humanistic work, one with welcome instances of love, religious questioning (through a variety of faiths) and one terrifically effective episode of magical surrealism.
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PRAISE
Lin’s books are most appealing for the insider’s look at Taiwanese culture, the motley crew of supporting cast and the multiple laughs per page.
— BookPage