Dim Sum Asylum

Dim Sum Asylum (2017) Rhys Ford

Roku MacCormick is part of the Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division, and things are not going well for him.

He lost his love and his daughters, and there is nothing in his life anymore but following in his mother’s footsteps and trying to be order to a deeply disordered place.

Gaines was the one who found me in the middle of the Riots to tell me my boyfriend, John, and our two daughters were killed in the raging block fires.

The story opens with him chasing his partner through Chinatown after catching him stealing a clutch of dragon eggs. And after that is finally cleared up with IA, he gets a new partner, Trent Leonard, who is seemingly without a lot of experience.

He shrugged off his jacket as I maneuvered the table into place. “I fucked up.”

It took a steady soul to admit he’d screwed up, and an even bigger swallow of pride to sacrifice what looked like a custom-tailored job because of it.

This started as a novella that was then fleshed out onto this story. So I had read the first part, but then it took off and went some place different, filling in more or Roku’s story, and giving his partner a past of his own.

There is boinking here (just as with the original novella) and I still don’t like there being a relationship between two law enforcement officers. Especially with one being senior to the other. On the plus side, since this was no longer a novella, they knew each other far better before they started boinking, so that’s something.

Another negative, however, was that Trent apparently had a thing for Roku and asked to be assigned to him as a partner, which just seems all kinds of wrong to me. I’d have to go back and re-read the novella to be sure, but I feel like that in making Trent more complex, he mostly just got complicated, and not especially in good ways.

The mystery was decent, although it did get pretty action/adventure-y at the end–possibly more than it needed to.

This is an earlier book that Ramen Assassin, and although it’s much better than Black Dog Blues, there are still a lot of weaknesses, and I’m glad I read the newer story first, else I might not have ready any of her later works.

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Rating: 7.5/10

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