It's the mid-18th century, and young Highland Scot Duncan McCallum is on a convict ship bound for the New World. Most of his family has been slaughtered, and he's having a hard time with the yoke of British oppression himself. He witnesses a series of murders and suicides among his fellow passengers, and goes diving into the Atlantic to save another. When he reaches New York he finds the French and Indian War in full swing, and his troubles really begin.

Once indentured to empire builder Lord Ramsey as a tutor to his children and connected to his utopian community in the Hudson Valley, Duncan scrambles to understand both his new setting and the continuing series of murders that follow in his wake. The conflicts among armies both private and government-backed, allies and enemies among the Huron, the French and members of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the knowledge that his soldier brother has become a renegade, make a mix to try his soul.

A string of dead people haunts the story, at times seeming more alive than the survivors. Also hauntingly beautiful are the bonds between the cultures of the Scots Highlanders and the Indians, both "true skin" peoples. Dark, complex and compelling in mystery, historical, and spiritual considerations, the reader wonders along with Duncan whether the New World will see oppression extended or explode in a new burst of freedom.
--Eileen Charbonneau, Historical Novels Review

Eliot Pattison's fifth mystery to feature exiled investigator San Tao Yun, Prayer of the Dragon is a mesmerizing tale of murder and deception, set in a remote region of Tibet.

Fearful of drawing the attention of the official government in Beijing, Shan, a former government official who was once condemned to a village at the base of the sacred Sleeping Dragon Mountain in Tibet, to investigate a series of grisly murders in which the victims' hands had been severed and removed from the scene of the crime. A man who had descended from the mountain covered in blood is the only suspect, but he's a foreigner: A Navajo from America. Blackmailed into finding the killer, Shan must also discover the motive for the murders. But the secrets of Sleeping Dragon are not easily learned and the danger precedes every step.

One just doesn't read Prayer of the Dragon; one participates with Shan on his extraordinary quest for the truth. This is not a book to be read quickly. The atmospheric setting and crisply written narrative are meant to be savored. It is relatively long at over 350 pages, but there are a few unnecessary passages. And the plot is fairly complex. At some point, however, the mystery of the murders becomes somewhat secondary, replaced by the wonder and awe of the mountain and its centuries of history. Shan's journey is fraught with peril along the Bon kora, the ancient path to the summit, and the certainty of the unknown affects both Shan and the reader.

Here's a typical, beautifully written, almost lyrical paragraph from early in the book:

As great as the mystery of the killer's identity was the mystery of the victims'. [Shan's friend Lokesh would insist that the spirits of the dead, like those of all murdered men, still lurked nearby. Shan found himself scanning the darkened slope. He would have welcomed a conversation with the ghost. His first question would be the one that had gnawed at him since visiting the death site the first time, when he'd seen the lightning snake and a portion of a little wooden figure. Why were these Tibetan things being done in non-Tibetan ways?

Much later, when Shan is heading out, he tells a companion, "Someone once asked Lokesh what I do. He told the man I am a confessor of ghosts. It's the best description I have ever heard. In my experience the only people who can be relied upon always to tell the truth are dead."

There are many intriguing aspects of the story that add complexity to the plot. One is the potential historic link between the Navajo and the Bon and how it plays into the motivation of some of the characters. Another is the political climate of Tibet and the conflict between the official government in Beijing and the officially unofficial government of the Tibetan villages. Yet a third is in the characters themselves which are wonderfully and uniquely drawn and frequently behave in not quite expected ways.

The climax has a bit of an Indiana Jones feel to it but the final chapter is contextually fitting and appropriate conclusion to a most remarkable book.

Prayer of the Dragon is a captivating experience. It's one of the year's best mysteries.

Thoughts of Tibet conjure up great sweeping vistas of snow-capped mountains, but the land of blue sheep and Buddhist lamas is also a place of secret caves and hidden valleys where plants used in an ancient medical tradition that treats both body and soul flourish even as knowledge of their properties is lost under China's brutal occupation. It's the concealed power of Tibet, the enduring glory of the abused land and the courage of the resistance movement that fights to keep Tibetan Buddhism and its healing arts alive, that fires Pattison's imagination and compassion, inspiring his series featuring the valiant Shan, formerly a Beijing investigator, now a lama's disciple. The saga begun in The Skull Mantra (1999) and continued in Water Touching Stone...flows on in Pattison's third soulful mystery, in which Shan is entrusted with returning the stone eye of a deity, a quixotic assignment that entails journeys both physical and spiritual and involves resourceful Tibetan rebels, a renegade American diplomat, an ancient medicine lama, and a ruthless Chinese army officer. Reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings with its quirky band of seekers traversing majestic yet treacherous landscapes, Pattison's densely plotted and incredibly detailed novel induces his entranced readers to care deeply about both his compelling characters and long-suffering Tibet.
-- Donna Seaman

Once in a while a great novel receives recognition for its inherent stature. Such was the case when Eliot Pattison's debut novel The Skull Mantra won the prestigious Edgar Award. His second novel, Water Touching Stone, would have won if The Skull Mantra hadn't; I mean, you can't keep handing the trophy over to the same guy, even if he deserves it. But the plain and simple truth is that no one is doing quite what Pattison is doing, and no one is doing what they do quite as well as what Pattison is doing.

If you are by chance unfamiliar with Pattison, or either of the aforementioned novels, you could certainly jump on with Bone Mountain. Although Bone Mountain is a continuation of the themes and characters introduced and explored in The Skull Mantra and Water Touching Stone, Bone Mountain stands quite well on its own, as Pattison continues to amaze and astound with some of the most compelling prose out there.

Pattison's protagonist is Shan Tao Lun, a former Beijing inspector who is living in exile in Tibet. The brutal subjection of Tibet by the Red Chinese over the last half-century is one of the great underreported stories of our modern time; one would think that a religious persecution resulting in the murder of over one million human beings would be newsworthy -- I mean, if Richard Gere can get it, anybody can -- but the silence frmo all quarters remains deafening. That tapping you hear at the edge of the periphery is Pattison, writing. Through Shan, he presents anecdotes of unspeakable brutality, but even more importantly, examples of quiet, heart-stopping courage in the face of adversity. It is impossible to read of Shan and the Buddhist monks who have taken him in without feeling admiration for his, and their, grace under circumstance and shame for the complaints of minor inconvenience -- dropped cell calls, traffic jams, secondhand smoke -- occasioned by the benefits of our way of life.

Bone Mountain opens with Shan preparing to accompany a pilgrimage to return "the jagged eye" of a venerated idol to its original habitat, an act full of symbolic and prophetic significance. The eye, stolen almost a century before, has been recently recovered. What Shan is initially unaware of is that the recovery of the eye involved its being "stolen" from a brigade of the Red Chinese army -- and the brigade wants the stone back. When the monk leading the pilgrimage is brutally murdered, what was once a careful, secretive pilgrimage becomes a headlong flight from an adversary whose power is matched only by its cruelty and ruthlessness.

Shan, at the same time, is at heart an "inspector," or investigator. He has a love of truth, and his devotion to truth results in his being an outcast. And that love of truth causes him to wonder: Why is the Red Chinese army so desperate to retrieve the stone eye? What role does an American oil company's drilling project have, and why has a geologist from that company abandoned the camp and fled into the mountains? And are any of these events connected to a rumor that an ancient, venerated lama is returning to Tibet to liberate his beleaguered nation?

Pattison gives his readers answers, true, but the beauty of his talent is in his framing of the questions. This is a man who has a love for the written language, and while his words flow with a poetic verve that is by turns beatific and terrible -- depending on his subject matter -- this is not prose that lends itself to a hurried or cursory reading. Pattison does not satisfy accuracy at the altar of experience. The reader comes away from each sitting with Stone Mountain intellectually challenged and culturally richer, as Pattison continues to explore the land, the mystery, and the tragedy that is Tibet.

Bone Mountain continues the process of shouldering Pattison out of genre adulation and into mainstream attention. And if he brings attention through these novels to the plight of the Tibetan people, then he will accomplish the task that he perhaps set out to perform to begin with.

"Few mystery sequels have been awaited with as much anticipation as this ... a worthy successor to Pattison's Edgar-winning The Skull Mantra."
--Publisher's Weekly

"A rich and multilayered story that mirrors the complexity of the surrounding land, where few things really are as they seem. It's rare when a mystery brings something fresh to the genre. Eliot Pattison accomplished this with The Skull Mantra, and is now back with another intruiging tale of Tibet. Pattison takes readers to a quietly troubled part of the world and peels away at the centuries of culture that have come into conflict."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Water Touching Stone is beautifully written and will stay with you long after you put the book down. It is probably best described as an intelligent thriller, although that really does not do it justice, as Pattison weaves together a delicate fabric made up of many strands from the political to the personal to create an engaging story."
--The Irish News

Given the critical and commercial success of Eliot Pattison's Edgar-winning debut novel, The Skull Mantra, which painstakingly limned contemporary Tibet's harsh beauty and defiant fatalism through the stoic perspective of Shan Tao Yun, a Chinese bureaucrat imprisoned in a Himalayan labor camp, it's no wonder the author's second novel returns to this hauntingly scarred country. But Water Touching Stone also widens the author's geographical and social scope. Shan must find a killer who is stalking orphan boys in the high mountains and deserts of the Xianjiang Autonomous Region.

Gendun, the senior lama at the monastery that has given Shan sanctuary, announces to his student, "You are needed in the north. A woman named Lau has been killed. A teacher. And a lama is missing." Though reluctant to leave the gentle presence of the monks who are balm to his crippled soul, Shan realizes he has no choice:

Gendun had told him the one essential truth of the event; for the lamas everything else would be mere rumor. What they had meant was that this lama and the dead woman with a Chinese name were vital to them, and it was for Shan to discover the other truths surrounding the killing and translate them for the lamas' world.

It turns out that Lau had taken upon herself the care of the zheli, a group of orphaned children from all corners of Xianjiang, and strove to help the children retain a sense of native identity in the face of the Poverty Eradication Scheme, which is Beijing-speak for the destruction of the herding clans and the transformation of the western steppes into a region of exploitableresources. Shan wonders whether officials from the People's Brigade (perhaps the "Jade Bitch," Prosecutor Xu Li), or the feared secret police "knobs" from Public Security decided to put a stop to her subversive activities. But when the children from the zheli begin dying amid horrific tales of the "demon" that came for them, bleak politics must grapple with darker imaginings.

The novel sports a practically Dickensian cast of characters, which might overwhelm the narrative by sheer numbers, yet Pattison manages to add depth to even the most minor of characters, and at the moments when the troupe threatens to become completely unwieldy, he deftly redeems the situation with moments of quiet poetry:

On they went, three small men in the vastness of the changtang, the wind sweeping the grass in long waves around them, the snow-capped peaks shimmering in the brilliant light of dawn. As they appeared over a small knoll they surprised a herd of antelope, which fled across the long plain. Except one, a small animal with a broken horn, which stared as if it recognized them, then ran beside them, alone, until they reached the road.
--Kelly Flynn

Despite the popularity of nonfiction books about Buddhism, fiction dealing with the dharma or its practitioners remains rare. Rarer still is popular (as compared to literary) fiction touching upon Buddhism. The Skull Mantra, by first novelist Eliot Pattison, an expert on international policy, is just such a rarity: a full-tilt thriller that exhibits a profound feel for Buddhism and how it manifests in a particular corner of the world: occupied Tibet, in the present day.

Pattison casts his plot as a murder investigation. A headless body is discovered by a Chinese-run prison labor crew (mostly Tibetan) in Tibet's remote Lhadrung County. Because the local prosecutor is away, and because the case must be closed quickly in order to satisfy Beijing, the country's Chinese governor, one Colonel Tan, turns for help to an unlikely source: a Chinese member of the prison crew, Shan Tao Yun, once a top Public Security Investigator in China but now in exile and behind bars. Aiding Shan in his investigation are his Chinese government liaison, Feng, and a Teibetan, Teshe, a former Buddhist monk now working for the prison administration system.

The case also takes Shan to areas of Tibet both expected (Lhasa) and unexpected (the forbidding high mountainous region of Kham). The author's description of these sites are potent (upon first seeing the Potala, Shan sinks to his knees: "Its huge lower walls, brilliant white and sloping steeply upward, gave the main structure the appearance of a vast, golden-roofed temple floating about Himalayan snows ... Never before in his life had Shan been afraid to look at something. He felt unworthy to stare at the building"). As such, the book offers a crisp, immediate travelogue of the Land of Snows, as well as of Tibetan Buddhism, with its mix of sophisticated meditative practice and adaptations of folk belief.

More importantly, Shan's investigations bring him into contact with a range of Tibetans, Chinese, and Americans (a group of Yanks pursuing a mining project plays a key role in the plot). It is in these characterizations that the book truly shines. Pattison conjures men and women on all points of the moral spectrum, from the saintly Choje Rinpoche, once abbot of a Tibetan monastery, now spiritual leader of the prison labor crew, to the icy-hearted Chinese major who, like so many of his countrymen, despises Tibetans and their beliefs. These extreme figures are sharply drawn, but the richest characters are those who embody the customary human mix of good and evil -- Shan himself, for example, and Col. Tan, and, in particular Teshe, who despite vigorous indoctrination by the Chinese ultimately can't resist the call of the dharma. While these people blend good and evil in satisfyingly complex ways, however, Pattison leaves no doubt as to what exactly he considers good (Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism) and what evil (the Chinese Communist system and its adherents who have invaded Tibet). His novel, with its depictions of monks in chains, blasted monasteries, and Chinese-sponsored devastation of the Himalayan environment, is a fierce polemic in story guise, serving up a searing indictment of the Chinese rape of Tibet.

Suspense runs high throughout, as Pattison employs variants of traditional storytelling stratagems -- will the real killer be found before a Buddhist hermit falsely accused of the crime is convicted and executed? Will Shan, Col. Tan, and Teshe submit to self-interest or fight for truth despite the consequences? -- to maximum effect. Like its obvious inspiration, Gorky Park, Pattison's novel uses the lens of thriller fiction to illuminate brilliantly the state of a (to Americans) little-known culture. That the culture is Tibetan Buddhist, under dire attack from Chinese influence, makes The Skull Mantra not only an exhilarating read, but an important one, politically and morally.
--Jeff Zaleski

Good books take us places we can't reach without transport: a remote locale, an alien culture, another time, or into the heart and mind of a remarkable character. Pattison provides truly remarkable transport, setting the reader in a forced-labor brigade in contemporary Tibet. Most of the prisoners are Buddhist monks, stoically resisting starvation, torture, and psychological indoctrination by their Chinese captors. One prisoner, Shan, is Chinese; no one, including Colonel Tan, the brigade commander, knows what offense caused Shan to be sent to Tibet and slow, near-certain death. It is known, however, that Shan was a high-level investigator in Beijing who incurred the wrath of a cabinet minister and that no treatment is too harsh for him. But when a decapitated body is discovered by the laborers, Tan decides that he needs Shan's investigative skills to prepare a show trial and keep official Beijing from looking closely at his command. When the headless corpse is identified as a Chinese prosecutor, and the prisoners refuse to work until Buddhist rituals are performed to restore spiritual harmony, rising tensions threaten genocidal reprisals. It's a riveting story, but it's also a great deal more. Pattison's narrative is filled with ritual, portents, and even demons, and he somehow imbues the harsh Tibetan gulag with moments of eerie beauty and serenity. It's a trip.
--Thomas Gaughan

Sentenced to penal servitude in Tibet, Shan, a disgraced prosecutor, is assigned instead to complete a pro forma investigation of the gruesome murder of a Chinese official. The party line is that dissident Tibetan monks are to blame, but Shan quickly realizes that the truth lies in other directions. Working with Buddhist rituals, Shan shapes and discards theories to fit a range of facts, emotions, and spiritual beings. Set in the mountainous regions of Lhasa, this first novel is a stark and compelling saga of the conflict between disdainful and violent Chinese and nonviolent Tibetans trying to protect the vestiges of their faith. As in Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries, Pattison's characters venerate traditional beliefs, and mystical insight is a tool for finding murderers. Pattison writes with confident knowledge and spare, graceful prose. With Tibet so much in the news lately, all public libraries will have readers for this book.
-- Barbara Conaty

Pattison debuts with this superb whodunit that leads an alienated Chinese detective to a cabal of hypocritical bureaucrats, meditating monks, and meddlesome Americans in contemporary Tibet. Serving an indefinite prison term in a Tibetan slave-labor camp for having embarrassed a high-ranking Party minister, former Public Security Investigator Shan Tao Yun is compelled by Colonel Tan, the fastidious Party boss of a remote county, to fabricate a report. The report will explain to Beijing the inexplicable murder of the local prosecutor, whose decapitated corpse was found buried near a road that must be completed before the American tourist season. The Buddhist monks in the camp, though, would rather be tortured or shot than work on a road where the prosecutor's "hungry ghost" is lurking, especially since they believe the murder was committed by Tamden, a supernatural demon bent on avenging Chinese persecution. Shan knows that failure to appease the Party's perverse sense of justice would make things only worse for the Tibetan people, whose religious faith he yearns to understand. Like Arkady Renko in Gorky Park, Shan finds that his effort to hide the truth paradoxically leads him to buried secrets within the Party hierarchy itself secrets hidden in ancient Tibetan caves in an American mining project whose naive scientists claim to want only what is best for Tibet. Alternately thwarted and helped by Yeshe, a brainwashed former monk, and by a cynical Chinese prison guard, Shan develops a marvelously complicated vision of an intricate, defiantly fatalistic nation inseparable from the beautifully bleak landscape that has shaped it. He also discovers a surprising dignity and compassion in some of his fellow Chinese, who remain enslaved to the venalities of leaders past and present. Breathlessly suspenseful tour of a dangerous and exotic landscape, where pposing forces, political and magical, give way to an eerie, mystical truth.

In the way that it was deemed that lyric poetry should no longer be possible after the Holocost, the thought of fictionalizing the plight of the Tibetan people since the Chinese invasion of their country in 1950 seems fatuous and insulting.

That an American international lawyer should take it upon himself to make this the theme of his first work of fiction could add salt to the would; the U.S., after all, leads an international community which has tiptoed around the Chinese for half a century without ever properly challenging them over Tibetan human rights issues.

Pattison, however, not only knows his Tibet. He loves it with a deep passion and has found a way to catalogue Chinese atrocities without it sounding like propaganda; to seek inside of the Tibetan soul and not romanticize it.

In The Skull Mantra, the Chinese are not all baddies and the Tibetans are certainly not all goodies. This is a thriller, a dective story as intricate as a Chinese puzzle. It is the stuff of nightmares in which no-one and nothing is as it seems.

Shan is a Chinese who has fallen from high places for presuming to criticize the regime. He has experienced the pain, humiliation, and degradation of public denouncement, torture, and hard labor. Because he was an investigator in Beijing, he is smuggled out of a Tibetan prison camp by the local Chinese commandment to make a report about the murder of a Chinese official. There's no promise of release, his guard is ostensibly an unreconstructed brute, and the young man assigned to help him is a former Tibetan monk who's been "re-educated" to understand the error of his ways with a promise of a job and a flat in Shanghai. Buddhist monks and Tibetan dissidents are the prime suspects. A chinese official is determined to have an execution and refuses to let evidence get in the way of conviction.

So far, so the expected anti-Chinese bias and Pattison certainly does not fail to weave into his Chinese puzzle every atrocity carried out in the name of assimilation. In the race against time to uncover the facts and save a man from a bullet in the head, however, Pattison reveals through Shan whole rafts of values which are alien to even a sympathetic West. That he can see Americans as others see them without turning them into characatures is a measure of his still in the world of fiction.

Pattison first visited China 20 years ago. His books and articles on international policy issues have been published internationally. He has successfully made the transfer from what the lay person would certainly perceive as the dry and precise world of international law to this emotional, colorful, sensitive arena of fiction.

He has not simply researched the complex, mystical world of Tibetan Buddhism; he has fallen in love with it. He has not only assimilated the facts about one nation's rape of another: he has understood that it is not only Tibetans who have suffered as a result of being denied their culture, their religion, and their language. The Chinese, transferred to Tibet in their droves to complete the process of ethnic cleansing, must adjust to this unyielding land.

There are many strands to this narrative, and Pattison never lets one of them loose. Only when he ties, knots, and trims fraying edges at the conclusion of The Skull Mantra is a Western desire for "happily ever after" in this life, rather than the next, allowed to escape.
--Marian Pallister

Breathtaking in its literary scope, refreshing in its exotic originality and heartbreaking in its exploration of the soul, The Skull Mantra is yet one more thing -- a thrilling, guess-till-the-end mystery.

First published in the fall of 1999, The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison has just won the 2000 Edgar Award for best first novel. It deserves that, and any more awards anyone can think of.

In Tibet, a headless corpse is found by a prison work gang. Among the Tibetan monks in the gang is a Chinese man, who was a successful police investigator before being tortured and imprisoned for not conforming to communist ideals. Shan is ordered by a Chinese military commander to solve the murder, and quickly -- American tourists are coming soon. But as with everything involving Chinese politics, there is another agenda.

"It's the socialist context that's important ... A murder investigation is pointless unless it can become a parable for the people," Shan says, with characteristic sarcasm.

But this is Tibet, where mysticism is intermingled with murder; perhaps, as several monks believe, the murderer is a demon. The investigation leads Shan to exotic locales, from secret shops where the chanting of a skull mantra can summon such demons, to hidden cloisters of monks in Tibet's vast mountain ranges. Pattison's depictions of characters is just as vivid, from a Chinese official who struggles with his conscience, to a Tibetan monk who cannot deny his heritage.

Above all, though, it is the textured and touching character of Shan who carries the novel. He is philosopher, interrogator and most dangerous of all, a seeker of the truth.

"I am beginning to understand you," a Chinese official tells Shan. "You solve problems by creating a bigger one. I wager that has a lot to do with why you are in Tibet."

The Skull Mantra is so good you can't wait to pick it back up, but then you find yourself reading slower and slower because you can't bear for it to be over. And when you do reach its perfect conclusion, you're sad that these rich and complex characters, these exotic places, aren't in your life anymore. One hopes there is a mantra to make Eliot Pattison write more, and soon.
--Michelle Ross