Book Reviews
Genre-wise, The Foreigner is best described as a thriller, rife with murders, drugs, secrets and betrayals. But you won't find any of the cardboard characters, clunky writing or clichéd conventions that too often mar suspense fiction. Lin is equally attentive to description and plot. As Emerson walks down the street one day, he notes that the sky "moved above me with the threat of solemnity and grace. A bird sang two high notes in the black slate landscape." The executor of his mother's estate is a "tall, cadaverous man with a voice that rasped like a twig." It's that lovely, detailed writing that makes you care about what happens to these characters more than you might have otherwise.
Carmela Ciuraru - Los Angeles Times
In Lin's stunning debut, a crime novel set in Taiwan, Emerson Chang, a 40-year-old virgin who's a financial analyst, travels from San Francisco to Taipei on a quest to scatter his mother's ashes and re-establish contact with his shady younger brother, Little P, who's been bequeathed the family hotel. At a meeting with Little P, Chang encounters two peculiar cousins, Poison and Big One, as well as Little P's devious friend, Li An-Qing (aka Atticus), who's anxious to get Little P to sell the family hotel to him. Emerson soon finds himself mixed up in machinations involving Atticus and extortion due to Little P's unsavory dealings. In addition, Emerson loses his job back in California, and the property he's inherited in Taipei turns out to have its own mysteries. Chang's distinctive voice propels a strong and original plot, with horrifying revelations. Taut, smart and often funny, this novel will satisfy readers of thrillers and general fiction alike.
Publishers Weekly
Crime fiction that tells us about life in mainland China have become so common (such authors as Lisa See and Qiu Xiaolong are among the leading practitioners) that it comes as a surprise to realize how little we know about what goes on in the darker streets of Taiwan. Fortunately for us, Francie Lin—a Harvard graduate and a former editor of The Threepenny Review—spent two years in Taiwan on a Fulbright Fellowship, which doubtlessly planted in her mind the idea for her absolutely riveting debut thriller. It's about a 40-year-old bachelor called Emerson Chang, a San Francisco financial analyst who doesn't speak a word of Chinese. He has spent his life looking after, and being browbeaten by, his Formosa-born mother, a tough cookie who runs a cheap motel she has renamed the Remeda Inn to suck in the chain's runoff. Mrs. Chang wears her nationality like overdone makeup, saying that her only wish is to have her ashes scattered on her native ground. When she dies, Emerson—after being somewhat shaken by the news of her large bequest to his younger brother, Little P, who deserted the family and is now deeply involved in the Taiwanese criminal underworld—sets off for Taiwan, where Little P seems to be running some very shady business out of his uncle's karaoke bar. Lin catches the flavor of the Taiwanese world—especially its underworld—with great skill. But she is best at combining her action scenes with touching moments of memory, as Emerson realizes how much his mother lost by coming to America. In a Taiwan hotel lobby, waiting for Little P to show up, Emerson listens to "the nasal strains of an old Shanghainese pop song.... My mother had liked these pop songs from the mainland herself, the old, plaintive ghost of Shanghai glamour."—Dick Adler
Barnes & Noble
A 40-year-old Taiwanese-American virgin tracks his younger brother into the worst of all possible worlds. Compulsively dutiful Emerson Chang has arrived in the crime-ridden city of Taipei bent on a double mission. Because his mother wants her ashes scattered in the land of her birth, he's carried them there. "At least she was easier to manage in her new form," he reflects. And because he's certain it would have pleased her, he'll hunt for Little P (P for Peter), a quintessentially undutiful son, but her favorite nonetheless. It's been ten years since he's heard from his rascally kid brother, but the instant he locates him, Emerson, who can be as naive as Candide, already knows that he's run true to form. Hard-bitten, shifty and less than delighted at the reunion, Little P now works for an uncle managing the family karaoke bar. Though Emerson speaks no Chinese, even he can spot sleaziness this obvious. This is no ordinary karaoke bar, and its employees, Poison and Big One, are no ordinary cousins but blood-thirsty thugs from whom Emerson instinctively recoils. But it's Little P who keeps the establishment's secret, a secret so ugly and embittering that it ends by pitting brother against brother with biblical fury. Lin can write, and this darkly funny debut is often engrossing, but would that her bachelor protagonist had been a shade less prissy.
Kirkus Reviews