Who wants the Shanghai Moon enough to kill for it?

I'm afraid I came late to this party. The Shanghai Moon, published in 2009, was S.J. Rozan's ninth Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery (she's since published two more). Chin and Smith are both private detectives in New York City, and the series is interesting because Rozan alternates point of view from book to book. Lydia Chin narrates The Shanghai Moon. 

The reader knows she's in accomplished hands from the first page. Here's Lydia returning to her Chinatown apartment to be greeted by her mother:

     "Who are you?" She shuffled from the kitchen and peered at me. "You look like my daughter, Ling Wan-ju, but I haven't seen her for a long time. She went to California. She said she'd be back soon, but she stayed. I'm happy she's having fun."
     My mother's sarcasm could cut diamonds.
     "Two extra weeks, Ma. And they're your cousins." I kissed her pappery cheek, which she grudgingly allowed. "Have a good time while I was gone?"

The mystery involves jewels that a Jewish wife of a wealthy Chinese official hid in their Shanghai compound during the chaotic closing days of WWII. They've been found, and a Communist Chinese official has absconded with them, apparently to New York. An American lawyer, a woman based in Zurich, an expert in recovering works looted by the Germans during the war, hires Joel Pilarsky, another PI, to find the thief. Pilarsky in turn hires Lydia for her Chinese and Chinatown contacts. And then Joel is murdered.

We learn about the romance between the Jewish woman and the Chinese man via letters that survived and are available on the internet. These, set in a different type,  are moving and convincing and by reading between the lines help the reader understand the history and family relations involved with the jewels.

Not only are the letters convincing, but so is Rozan's evocation of New York's Chinatown. There may not be a Chinese gang called the White Eagles to which Lydia's distant cousin—nickname Armpit—aspires, but I am willing to believe it is. Rozan is also wonderful at writing dialogue that conveys character, advances the story, and adds to the reader's knowledge:

     "Can you really read that?" Bill asked as I got back into the car . . . 
     "Why wouldn't I be able to?" I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.
     "Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it's probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, thought Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese."
     I stared at him. "What are you, Wikipedia?"

The story threads become quite tangled before Lydia and Bill are able to pull them straight. That there are many Chinese names, some similar, may put off certain readers. But at the end of The Shanghai Moon in the middle of the denouement Rosan gives Lydia an observation that is so appropriate and so funny I could not read it for laughing. I may have come late, but I thoroughly enjoyed the party.