“You should be careful with who you dance. Rumours fly if you dance with the wrong man.”

Shanghai, 1922, a city of contrasts, a city in China full of westerners where the law is something that is tolerated rather than followed. Detective Rod Cottey of the Shanghai Municipal Police went there to seek solace after the trauma of the Western Front, but some experiences will never stop haunting you…

When a rich banker’s chauffeur is killed in a gunfight, and the word “Traitor” carved into his forehead, Cottey soon finds himself embroiled in a conflict between the various factions of the city. The city is built on secrets – and those secrets are going to result in many more deaths before they come to light…

Michael Jecks has long been a friend of the blog (and the blogger). I first encountered his work through the Last Templar series (I think that’s what they’re calling that series now), one of my favourite crime series, tales of character and history, all with a multilayered crime plot. Since then, he’s written the Jack Blackjack series, a more light-hearted series set in the time of Queen Mary, and has recently started a new series set in the modern day set in the art world, the second of which, Landscape Of Murder, is out next month.

One Last Dance Before I Die is the first in a new series set in 1922 Shanghai, and in style it’s much closer to The Last Templar series, in part due to the longer page count. The story has time to breathe, and the characters have time to develop, but what is one of Michael’s skills as a writer is that while we find out more about the characters’ background, motivations and relationships, the story never feels like it is standing still, as the plot continues to develop.

As a mystery, it probably sits closer to the noir genre than the whodunnit genre, but our hero isn’t going around punching confessions out of people, thankfully. What really elevates this tale is the setting.

Shanghai in 1922 feels like an alien city, as divorced from the current everyday as medieval Devon in some ways. It’s not a setting that I’ve seen before (bar, as mentioned in the afterword, the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) – this is the sort of thing I want to see in historical novels, learning about times and places that I previously knew nothing about, and this delivers in spades.

It certainly looks like there is more to come in this series and I heartily look forward to it. This is an enthralling dip into an unknown past coupled with a gripping narrative. I’m reviewing this a little late, as I wanted to be in the right frame of mind to really appreciate it – and I certainly did.

And this is fairly irrelevant, but that’s a magnificent cover…