This is a corker of a quest yarn. The author knows much about Chinese history and unspools it for the lucky reader in a tale of unlikely companions on a fantasy adventure with a supernatural chunk of jade. The damn owl, as one of them repeatedly says, connects the travelers with the dead Chinese past, when it isn’t trying to destroy the living. From time to time it even hoots.
The humor is chuckle-worthy (my favorite: “He viewed the twenty-hour haul to China like a middle passage—voluntary bondage in the hull of a modern metallic slaver”) and, despite an occasional typo (the persistent grammatical confusion of past/passed also slows things down), the plot rocks along in can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens fashion.
Patterson’s vocabulary can be pretentious at times (people rarely walk, they saunter), even confusing when the words are obscure, but a good dictionary helps. Except for the words he makes up, but their meaning usually is clear. And this is only the beginning of a saga with sequels to come. Fly away on a long-distance hunt with The Jade Owl. You face little danger of grounding.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 