When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow's Child with her.Īs they dig deep into the victim's past, The Shadow's Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau's own murky past-and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow's Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. The Tea Master and the Detective is a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appareance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.Ī transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow's Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers.

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. ' The Tea Master and the Detective is a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it.

Tea master and the detective