The Fox Wife

 The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo, 390 pages.

This novel follows two protagonists in Manchuria at the start of the twentieth century. Bao is a detective in a time before private detectives are really a thing that exist, but he's been able to hear lies since he was a small child, and using this power to solve people's problems brings him great satisfaction. He is especially intrigued when a girl is found frozen to death in an alley and people say it is the work of foxes, a subject that has fascinated him his whole life. Snow is a fox spirit (a traditionally trickstery spirit who consumes qi to live) on the hunt for her child's murderer. Their separate searches often overlap across Manchuria at the end of the Qing dynasty, and together the reader can put together answers to a whole slew of questions. 

I quite enjoyed this book, although I definitely have some criticisms. The setting was really interesting, and I think Choo did an excellent job making this story feel very rooted into it's setting while also keeping it accessible to people who don't know all that much about Chinese history. I also really like both of the protagonists, and I really enjoyed watching them interact with the world. Unfortunately, even when the protagonists eventually meet it never really feels like the two stories come together, which is puzzling since the plots definitely do. The perspectives shift every chapter, and I found it, without fail, jarring. I believe it is because it feels like the two protagonists are in different genres despite having very similar plots. Despite sometimes feeling like I was reading two books squished together, I still really liked it, and found it fun to put together the information gathered across different plots. I would recommend this book, especially to fans of historical mysteries and classic detective readers who don't mind a splash of fantasy.