A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Last Violent Call
Chloe Gong
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
Yes, thank you, I WILL take this massive payoff. After three books of monsters, gangsters, scientific intrigue, and Chinese politics – possibly worse than the first three things combined – this is exactly the silly, giggly, lighthearted palate cleanser I needed. To be clear, people still die in this book, but it’s not the end of the world, you know? They quite literally had it coming. They only have themselves to blame. If you’d have been there, if you’d have seen them, I betcha you would’ve done the same, or at least I certainly would’ve.
Last Violent Call is made up of two connected novellas titled A Foul Thing and This Foul Murder, overlapping with the end of Foul Lady Fortune and continuing into the following year. In September 1931, while Rosalind Lang watches the unexpected love of her life get brainwashed and abducted by his own mother, Luomin and Zhuli Mai – formerly Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai – live quietly in the town of Zhouzhuang, as they have done for the last few years. Four years ago they blew Dimitri Voronin and his monsters to Kingdom Come and escaped into a nearby sewer, where they weathered the worst of the blast, and from there they managed to get into a safe house. When things had calmed down enough, Juliette’s cousin Celia helped them get out of town, with the full knowledge that they could never come back. In the present day, they have established themselves as underground weapons dealers, leveraging of course their contacts from their years as the heirs of Shanghai’s most infamous gangs. The only other people who know about their escape are Roma’s cousin Benedikt and his husband Marshall, who fled to Moscow some time ago and are still there, though they regularly call. (Benedikt was pissed out of his skull when he found out that Roma and Juliette and faked their deaths; Marshall seems to have rolled with it, and loves exchanging gossip with Juliette.) Despite his estrangement from his presumably still-missing father, Roma has also been keeping close tabs on his younger sister, Alisa, and in fact has been quietly paying all her bills while waiting for a safe moment to bring her to Zhouzhuang.
Their covers are seemingly blown when they are tracked down by Yulun (technically Yu Lun, or Lun Yu in the Western nomenclature, but he says his name so fast that everyone mistakes it for one name, so Yulun it is), a desperate seventeen-year-old who appeals to them for help in protecting his fiancée. Having escaped from a scientific research facility in Vladivostok, Milyena (“Mila”) managed to make her way into northern China, along with several other girls who escaped at the same time; however, the facility board has a long arm, and it seems determined to kill its former subjects. Though Juliette initially refuses Yulun’s plea, she and Roma eventually get dragged in when they learn that Mila’s friends have all been killed, presumably by the men sent after them. Mila herself has been moving from place to place for her own safety, accompanied by Yulun, but she keeps receiving sinister address-free messages from a man named Pyotr Gavrilovich Spikov, who – along with former White Flower Lourens Van Dijk – was one of the scientists in charge of Mila’s project. After interrupting an attempted abduction, Roma and Juliette take the young couple back to Zhouzhuang and shelter them in their own house while they begin to investigate the board’s hired thugs. They also begin to teach Mila how to stab people, which, all things considered, seems like a pretty solid idea.
After a whirlwind investigation complete with conjugal trolling and one psycho, well-armed woman (both of which I LOVE), Roma and Juliette track Pyotr to his house, where they learn that Mila and her friends were put through a process he calls “chemical conditioning” (a scientific euphemism for “brainwashing”), developed by Lourens. Lourens left the facility after Pyotr took his work and injected it into the girls, and Pyotr himself now wants to recover the research he stole. Unfortunately, he also installed each girl with a safeguard, a defense mechanism that wipes their minds and forces them to tear out their own throats in a manner that mimics the 1926 Shanghai epidemic. Though Roma and Juliette – and Mila as well – initially assumed that the mechanism was triggered by sheer proximity, that is, that the girls are programmed to commit suicide when on the verge of capture, Pyotr tells them that the trigger is in fact the prick of a needle. Thus, while the hired thugs actually intend no real harm and have merely been instructed to draw the girls’ blood in order to return the research to the facility, all such attempts have so far ended with the girls dying before any samples could be retrieved, exactly as Pyotr intended. After providing Lourens’s address under duress, Pyotr smugly admits that he has two vials of a purported cure locked away in a safe (also stolen from Lourens) and tries to use this as leverage, but Juliette shoots him dead and breaks the safe open without any trouble.
Meanwhile, back in Zhouzhuang, Mila and Yulun have been staying with Mrs. Fan, a kindly neighbor. Unfortunately, they are still discovered and attacked by a persistent goon. Roma and Juliette arrive just barely in time to confront him, but are unable to stop him from trying to draw Mila’s blood. With no options left, Roma manages to restrain Mila before she can tear out her own throat, while Juliette injects her with one of Pyotr’s vials. Luckily for them, Pyotr was telling the truth: the antidote wipes out every chemical command that had previously been installed in Mila, freeing her from the control of the facility. The grateful young couple returns to a more normal life; the goons who attacked them are quietly handed over to Ah Tou, a devoted minion who is tasked with roughing them up enough to discourage further attacks. Not long after the dust has settled, Juliette reads the Shanghai daily newspaper and learns that Rosalind’s cover has been blown, and that her partner Orion has been subjected to chemical experiments eerily reminiscent of the last four years of Shanghainese history. With one vial of the antidote still in her possession, Juliette relays a message to the hospital where Rosalind has been staying, telling her she can help her get Orion back.
This Foul Murder picks up in January 1932, when Benedikt Montagov (alias Sokov) and Marshall Seo board a train for Vladivostok, where Roma has asked them to find Lourens and bring him to Zhouzhuang. Already on a tight timeline due to the unforgiving schedule of the trains, they find their task complicated further when the disagreeable man in the compartment next to theirs – one Danila Andreyevich Popov – expires in a pool of blood with a fountain pen jammed into his windpipe. Train officer Vodin wishes (not unreasonably) to call in the police at the next station, but Marshall quickly offers his and Benedikt’s services as private investigators. Vodin reluctantly agrees, partly because Marshall warns him of the possibility of losing the murderer at the next stop but also partly because of his young nephew, Lev Grigoryevich Vodin, an aspiring journalist who’s dying for a showstopping article. Despite the grumbles of the other passengers, Vodin agrees to run the train straight to Vladivostok without taking any of its scheduled stops, but also tells Marshall that this will change if the investigation does not produce results.
With nothing else for it, Marshall buckles down eagerly and begins a somewhat haphazard investigation of the train and its passengers, but hits dead ends everywhere he looks. The threatening paint-daubed message on the bathroom mirror and the traces of drugs left in an empty compartment turn out to be a red herring, and Marshall and Benedikt almost get left at the wrong station in pursuit of this herring. Finally, with no obvious results, Vodin decides to stop the train in Irkutsk, where it will be boarded by actual police, but Benedikt gets a timely breakthrough when he recognizes fellow passenger Yeva Mikhailovna based on Roma’s description, and correctly identifies her as Mila Yu. During a grand presentation in the train’s dining car, Benedikt and Marshall walk Vodin, Lev, and the rest of the passengers through the unfortunate accident that they claim took Popov’s life, though I have to admit my first thought was “Y’all making this up?” while they were going through it.
With that story firmly in place, they return to Mila’s compartment, where she tells them that she has been hunting down the members of the board, who just couldn’t leave her and Yulun alone even after the events in Zhouzhuang, and has been putting them out of commission in ways that look like accidents. Popov was a member of the board and thus was marked for death, and she now has two more board members to go, both of them in Vladivostok. With that done, she intends to return home to Yulun. Though she asks if they’re going to turn her in, Benedikt and Marshall tell her that they (24M) have been killing since before she (18F) was born, and she is definitely NTA. As a parting gift, Benedikt gives her his own pistol, telling her it’s quicker and easier than staging elaborate accidents. Finally they all arrive in Vladivostok; Mila goes off to do her thing, and Marshall and Benedikt learn that their next train – the train to Harbin – has been moved up an hour, which means they can theoretically get to Zhouzhuang an hour earlier than planned, but only if the hunt for Lourens doesn’t give them too much grief.
My problems with Chloe’s verb use remain unchanged, but I. LOVE. THIS. BOOK. It seems like I love Roma more and more with every book, which is good, because we really wouldn’t want that to be going the other way. This is the first Secret Shanghai book to make it to my deserted island list and I am so irrationally pleased because I really love Chloe Gong and I was kinda low-key hoping all her books would end up on that list. I think I’m starting to get why other people go crazy over their favorite ships. This is the only series I can think of where every couple is a HELL FUCKING YES, from Roma and Juliette to Benedikt and Marshall to Celia and Oliver to Rosalind and Orion and even Mila and Yulun, I mean, they have promise. I ship them all. I don’t ship Phoebe and Silas at the moment, but that could very possibly change after Foul Heart Huntsman has had its say. (Or not. As Orion says, Phoebe does have an unhealthily demanding attachment to Silas. Either way, I don’t count them because they’re not actually a couple.)
Though these stories were shorter than the lengthy tomes that make up the rest of the series, I don’t feel cheated by their brevity. They’ve brought me back to my favorite characters while also introducing some solid new additions, and it’s great. I hope we’ll see more of Mila and Yulun later; they seem like good kids. I am just sliiiiiiightly skeptical that a few days in Juliette’s company were enough to turn Mila into such a proficient killer, but, well, this isn’t really the kind of series where you question every detail. (Regarding Mila’s guilt: I had her pegged as the killer the moment she passed Marshall and Benedikt in the hall with a thermos of tea, though I didn’t know who she was or what her motive might be. But I’m actually not unduly bothered by the predictability of the resolution.) I was also glad that Lourens is not on Mila’s hit list because I always kind of liked him, and I am so glad that he doesn’t seem to have been involved in the shadier practices of the Vladivostok lab. His work tends to verge on the questionable, but I would at least like him to be given a chance to explain himself. I am particularly looking for an explanation on the extremely convenient immortality formula you just happened to have lying around during Rosalind’s hour of greatest need, Lourens. Believe me when I say I really would love to believe the best of you, it’s just that your work is a little sketch at the best of times.
As for the unofficial prince and princess of Shanghai crime, I love them SO MUCH. Juliette remains my uncontested favorite; I have always loved morally gray women. I wasn’t impressed with Roma after the first book, but he has steadily grown on me over time. I love that he sees Juliette exactly as she is – that is, gleefully violent and a little strange in the brain – but he loves her so ferociously because of who she is, not in spite of it. I was giggling and kicking my feet through their story (and, to be honest, through Benedikt and Marshall’s story as well) because their relationship is so wonderfully goofy and loving and supportive. After all the teenaged angst and the goopy drama of the first two books, this little interlude was a breath of fresh air. I don’t thrive on the back-and-forth-stay-or-go-will-they-won’t-they that seems to keep others hooked. I am not romance-inclined. I am boring. I like it when people get along. I love when Juliette trolls Roma because it speaks to a strong, loving relationship, and it is cute rather than unpleasant. I am so glad we picked up with them after they’d had four years to begin to figure things out, though the trauma of their earlier lives remains ingrained in their bones, in their nightmares. I am so hopeful that they will have a long and happy life in this peaceful town, surrounded by oblivious neighbors who have begun to accept them as two of their own.
I was at first infuriated (because spoilers) and then resigned when I found out via the Last Violent Call synopsis that Roma and Juliette had survived, and I took it as a sign that Gong cannot say goodbye to her characters. I don’t think I was wrong in that, but I am also so glad that she can’t, because I can’t say goodbye to them either. I want a healthy Zhouzhuang-based fusion of the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers, dammit. I want it. I’m glad Celia is in Taicang and can easily visit and all, but I want her and Rosalind and Alisa in Zhouzhuang, and I want Benedikt and Marshall to come back from Moscow even if Benedikt has been teaching Muscovite children to draw omfg that is so cute, and I want them all to be the family they were born to be. Mila can be an honorary member, since she’s got quite good at stabbing people. I even love Ah Tou, who isn’t part of the family but still shows them an unquestioning loyalty, and I hope we see more of him in the next and final book.
I am so sad that I only have one Secret Shanghai book left to read, though I suppose it is best to cut off the series before it gets bad or the premise gets stale, whichever comes first. I can’t really mourn too much when I will at least still have the Flesh and False Gods series to keep me occupied – Chloe is, if nothing else, a terrifically prolific writer – but I will miss this world and these characters, who are so outrageous and yet so human and so utterly lovable. This tranquil interlude is so beautifully peaceful, an affectionate, hilarious, surprisingly lighthearted breath of air before the storm that is gathering. The violence doesn’t bother me; it isn’t gory or gratuitous, and it gives me a pretty sweet vision of what should happen to men who can’t take “LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE” for an answer. None of these deceased are innocent, all of them got what they deserved, and if I’d been in Benedikt’s place I would’ve handed Mila the gun too.
