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The book opens with the disquieting statement, "It was the last day of January and the New Year was approaching. The city of Los Angeles had been winding down for more than a week," a remark that lightly evokes the first sentence of 1984. The holiday is of course the Chinese New Year, but the city's celebration is not a courtesy to its large Chinese-American population but a less voluntary observance exacted by the city's current master, the People's Republic of China. We are in the near future, a time when the declining United States has slipped from its position as first super-power and has had to accede to demands from its major creditor. Most galling is the presence of large Chinese garrisons on the west coast, established to protect the customs duties exacted as a means of repayment of large US debts. These are resented by the local population, but anger has been blunted by years of ineffective resistance.
Madison Webb is an thirty-year-old investigative reporter of the old school. We see her first gone undercover at a sweatshop. When her little sister Abigail is found murdered, Maddy applies all of her skills to discovering who has killed her because the police seem singularly uninterested. Her quest leads her into the corrupt dark heart of the intersection between the civic administration and the Chinese power behind the scenes. As Freeland is himself an award-winning journalist and an editor on the Guardian, his description of how newspapers work seems highly credible. Somewhat less so is his protagonist, who is a bit of an Energizer bunny. An insomniac, she apparently can go for days, perhaps weeks, without sleep. She has an astounding ability to work through intense physical pain and seems able to recover from injury (and she suffers quite a bit of it) remarkably quickly. In short, she's a tough character but not an approachable one. It is to Freedland's credit, however, that he stocks his cast with a number of confident, competent, successful women who do interact with one another in positive ways. That's something rarer than you might think.
The real strength of the book, aside from a plot that insists you read the next chapter immediately, is in the way Freedland has conveyed the politics of the United States following the Chinese triumph. The author was once the Washington correspondent for the Guardian and as Sam Bourne has published several best-selling thrillers set in the United States. Here he imagines a country on whom the tables have been utterly turned. No longer a world super-power, the inhabitants now suffer the indignities of second-class. LA is a centre of the rag trade because labour costs there are lower than in Mexico. The garrison bases provoke the same sort of irritation and resentment that comparable American military bases now do on Okinawa. The forces posted to the garrisons enjoy diplomatic immunity and misbehave with impunity. Hollywood films now have to be sent to Beijing for approval before they can be released. Twitter is now Weibo and tweets are weibs.
But far beyond that is the degree to which the Americans have assimilated elements of Chinese culture as a way of associating themselves with power. Ambitious people speak excellent Mandarin; fashionable women wear black wigs and cheongsams on dressy evenings. Rude English words are gradually yielding to their equally rude Chinese equivalents. All of these details are simply larded through the text without comment, a sophisticated and subtle way to convey the point.
Chinese-style corruption has found a happy ally in the old-fashioned California style familiar at least as far back as Raymond Chandler. Thus Madison has her work cut out for her as her investigation leads her closer and closer to the Chinese enclave. Both the California power elite and the more remote though more effective Chinese bureaucrats are determined that she not learn, and worse, reveal too much.
THE 3RD WOMAN is by no means perfect. It is over-written in spots and flirts dangerously with a Bad Sex Award citation at least once. But it is also provocative and engrossing. Its political substratum gives it a weight that thrillers often lack while avoiding rant or preaching. It assumes a reader who is reasonably intelligent and can follow along briskly without being spoon-fed. What more can you ask from a summertime thriller?
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2015
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