14 Days China

The blending of a Who Done It, and of a travelogue from Beijing to Shanghai, makes for both exciting and eye opening reading. Thirteen American tourists and their Chinese tour guide expose all their intimate pasts, as they experience present day China. With support of the tour guide and abetted by the self-declared class clown, the group becomes lifelike, in a small world of their own. Through the eyes of the author, the reader sees China with its lengthy artistic history, economic freedoms, Communistic political policies, and thriving happy children. The tour visits Beijing, Xian, Chongqing, Fengdu, Jingzhou, and Wuhan; it includes a lengthy Yangzi River cruise and is to end in Shanghai. The story, 14 Days China, takes us from the ending of the trip in Shanghai back to the beginning of the tour and finally after thirteen days of togetherness and sightseeing, to a surprising ending. The narrative starts when Chinese officials discover a stolen Chinese icon from the Western Han Dynasty, hidden in the Americans' joint luggage. Who stole it from a China National Museum? How could this happen? How can this be resolved? As the reader gets to know the characters, he or she will suspect various possible complicities in the crime. The mystery is solved and ends when all the jigsaw pieces interlock on the fourteenth day.