Deception by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri

Reading this book was unusually difficult for me. Maybe because I was far more used to reading Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee Mysteries, where the Judge's hard edges have been filed off (because I read Dee Goong Anh, or "The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee", and was a little put off by the very real harshness of the penal code in that time.) Or maybe it was the fact that the book is over 600 pages long and takes place over the lifetime of the venerated Judge.

The book starts out with Dee as a young man, an Assistant Magistrate in Yangchou. A man, a gardener, has been hanged for the murder of a local Minster of Transport. Dee feels that the gardener, a man with extremely bad teeth, would not have been able to stand over the corpse and eat the honeyed cakes that the Minister had been snacking on. He investigates and manages to get the man's robe and does a little demonstration on his own. Someone definitely stood over the dead man eating the cakes. But could a man with rotting teeth do so without incurring a great deal of pain?

Meanwhile, the new Emperor, Kaotsung, has taken one of his father's concubines as his own mistress. Wu Tse-tien ties him to her with a special caress, making herself the only one who can ignite the new emperor's lust. Then, after giving birth and smothering her own female child, she has the Emperor dismiss his wife (saying that the Empress was the one who killed her child) and has Wu Tse-tien take her place. Kaotsung's six councillors are aghast at the Emperor's behavior, but she has her newly-appointed "Court Historian" circulate a pamphlet subtly heaping scorn on the councillor's heads. Soon, two of them have committed suicide to deal with the strain, and the other four are arrested, tried, declared insane, and sent to the country in hope of a cure. Only one, Wu-Chi, manages to escape and go into hiding at a Buddhist monastery under the guise of an old man who can no longer remember his name. The other three are killed on the orders of the Empress, under the guise of suicides. She announces that all of the councillors have died, so that no one will even think of looking for, or believing Wu-Chi, if he were to come back and announce itself.

Meanwhile, Dee has risen high in the court, because he has been campaigning against the Buddhists who have come and taken over from the Confucian Hierarchy. He has gone after several Buddhist charlatans who were defrauding the people with bogus miracles, and spurious sutras and artifacts. His opposition to Buddhism itself, however, puts him in bad odor with the court, and he is told to leave the upper class of people alone, but to protect the lower and middle classes, who need more guidance.

Empress Wu soon gets tired of Kaotsung, and begins having affairs everywhere, mostly with Buddhist holy men from Tibet, who claim to know superior techniques of endurance. But when he shows interest in other women of her family, she has the other women killed, jealous for her power. When Kaotsung has a stroke, she nurses him back to limited health, but he is afraid of her and ends up hating her. As time passes, his own sons by her seek to bypass her authority and she ends up disposing of two of them. Shortly after, Kaotsung dies, and she takes over the reins of power completely.

Meanwhile, Judge Dee pairs up with an honest Buddhist holy man to take down the fakes and conmen seeking to prey on China's newborn love for Buddhism. But when he sends the holy man into the household of the Empress' mother, the man apparently decides that the Empress can give him more, and ends up becoming the leader of a new brand of Buddhism, called the White Cloud, and also the abbot of White Cloud Monastery, built in the capital. This man, Hsueh Huai-i, proclaims the Empress to be the leader of the divine ones on earth, the body of the goddess, and the spirit of God. She takes to this immediately, and bolstered by many donations from the Empress, the new religion spreads.

Dee, without his former friend, and shocked by this betrayal, chooses to leave the Capitol and take a new post in a faraway city, Ch'ang-an, about 300 li from the capital of Loyang. While there, he must solve a series of murders which are occuring in his city. Whole families slaughtered in their houses, cut up and mutilated, and then, apparently, a horse led through the house and a pool of blood. The citizens believe that the murders are the work of demons, and even Judge Dee's wives and mother are afraid.

As Dee works to solve the mystery, he is arrested for disloyalty to the crown. Some of the men know he is innocent, and work to free him from his captivity. They manage to free him, and Dee works with them to stop the murderers and prove his innocence. When Dee does stop the murderers, he finds that they are monks of the White Cloud Monastery, under orders from his old friend, Hsueh Huai-i.

Hsueh Huai-i is falling out of favor with the Empress as well. She suspects that he is sleeping with the women who serve as nuns in his monastery, and he is no longer satisfying her in bed. He claims that her rooms stink of the dogs she keeps as pets and companions, and she blames his drunkenness and gluttony. She attempts to remove him from his position, and he withdraws her supposed divinity, saying that due to her own lecherousness and whoring, it has left her for a virgin. Since he was responsible for putting the god into her with his lovemaking, he will attempt to impregnate any and all women who would like to assume such a divine position.

Judge Dee doesn't like the Empress. Through the friendship of Wu-Chi, he is aware of her killing of her sons and daughter, and her role in the downfall of the Emperor. But to bring down Hsueh Huai-i, he goes to her and shows what the White Cloud Abbot has been up to. She authorizes Dee to arrest in try him, in exchange for clemency for herself, at least until her mother passes away.

Dee arrests, tries and sentences Hsueh-Haui-i to death. Hsueh tells the Judge when he is arrested that he was also responsible for the death of the Minister of Transport all those many years ago. However, instead of sending him to his death, he sentences him to be returned to Tibet. The monks responsible for the murders he sentences to perpetual imprisonment, helping to build the Great Wall in one of its most inaccessible mountain locations.

Finally, he returns to his work, and many years later, he is summoned to the Capital, where the Empress lies dying. Her mother, though, is amazingly still alive...

This was a novel where a lot of stuff went on. The main part covered more than 20 years in the life of both Judge Dee and the land of China. It is set in a turbulent period, when China was moving from being mostly Confucianist, to being mostly Buddhist. Dee remains, throughout the novel, a staunch Confucianist, even though his wives become enamoured of Buddhism. Another thread running through the novel is his two sons, who are ne'er-do-wells who seem cut out only for villainy. Yet another is the rise of Wu Tsu-tien, a real woman who became Empress of China, the first and only Empress of China. The book writes about her objectively, but considering the things she does, it is hard to see her as admirable: Killing off her baby daughter so she can get rid of Kaotsung's first empress, having her pet historian write scurrilous screeds about Kaotsung's council because they dislike her, Killing two of her sons because they would seek to overthrow her, and so on. None of these made her particularly likeable. And even when bad things happen to her, like when Kaotsung rapes her after finding her with one of her lovers, you kinda think she had it coming.

So when Judge Dee goes to her and agrees to forgo charging her in order to bring in Hsueh Huai-i, it's rather disappointing, and disconcerting. And then the authors play the "madness" card to make us hate Huai-i. I honestly thought that, even if he was mad, the Empress was the worse kind of criminal, killing off her own children. I wanted some kind of payment out of her, too, but I had to settle for her dying about 30 years later, and the fact that she expressed regret on her deathbed, none of which really satisfied me in the end. The book also ends with a very Buddhist ending of Hsueh Huai-i, by having him apparently reborn as an Ox pulling heavy loads in Tibet.

Well, it was a very interesting read, but the ending was not really all that enjoyable because of the lack of closure on the deeds of the Empress. Next up, "The Armor of Contempt" by Dan Abnett.