THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410250517
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
CHINA WHITE
PETER MAAS
Simon & Schuster. 270 pp. $23.
Peter Maas can make your blood run cold without seeming to try. His use of quiet narrative to serve up horror, and a lot more, is what gives his new novel, China White, most of its bite and hypnotic quality.
With a background of such real-crime best sellers as The Valachi Papers and Serpico, he proves in China White that he has become a fine hand at fiction, too.
In this book, Maas shifts focus from the predations of La Cosa Nostra to the ballooning power of Asia-rooted criminal cartels. An author's note makes the point that this mirrors what is really going on in a violent subculture more and more dominated by drug traffickers.
The ``China White'' of the title is the street name of a highly purified form of heroin, a narcotic flowing out of the opium-poppy fields of Southeast Asia's ``Golden Triangle,'' where Thailand, Burma and Laos meet. One reason for China White's growing use and growing threat to overwhelm law enforcement efforts is that needles, and the risk of AIDS, can be avoided.
In the Maas story, Chinese criminal ``triads,'' transplanted from mainland China to Hong Kong, form a sinister web extending into more and more American urban areas. The ``dragon head'' of one of these is the gruesomely efficient Y.K. Deng. He has a past as both a drug smuggler and a CIA ``asset'' (both at the same time, cynically enough) in the Vietnam War. The novel revolves around his relocation of his vice syndicate headquarters to New York to avoid problems with his old enemies, the communists, when they take over Hong Kong in a few years.
Deng is a master of organization and of dealing summarily with opposition, whether drug agents or rivals. He has no qualms about killing off or otherwise betraying his own associates to gain his ends. His projected grand stroke (a blockbuster cargo of China White for distribution through a Cosa Nostra apparatus in America) runs head-on into a minefield of potentially disastrous problems: his emotional weak point (the sun rises and sets on his daughter, a student in the States); the sharp instincts of a former federal prosecutor and the woman - an FBI agent - he has fallen for; and the readiness of some of Deng's Asian cohorts to pull off betrayals of their own.
Scenes shift dizzily, and the twists of the plot are complicated, but Maas follows them adroitly, never getting very far ahead of the reader. His characters are believable human beings - even the most sinister and superficially mechanical of them. And two sets of ardent lovers, also doing credible things, leaven the grimness. There is action enough to make this a popular movie.
But there is no question about the total viciousness of much that happens in these pages. Nor is there any use in denying the sense of peril - almost despair - that Maas evokes in his look at the latest expansion of the drug underworld and its amoral, brutal ways.
Both as a breathtaking read and as a wake-up call on the Asian heroin boom (Maas buttressed the fictional work with a nonfiction warning in a recent issue of Parade magazine), China White deserves good marks. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
Peter Maas will appear with authors Laurence Leamer and Bill Thomas at a
book and author dinner at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Holiday Inn Hotel and
Conference Center in Hampton. For reservations, call the Junior League
of Hampton Roads, at 873-0281. The event benefits the Va. Peninsula
Council on Domestic Violence.
by CNB