As near as one can tell, Lionel Davidson has had a career marked by totally random spasms of success.  He had a best seller several years ago (1994) with the excellent thriller Kolymsky Heights a sort of male version of Smilla's Sense of Snow.  So I went back and read his earlier, much earlier, books and they were uniformly excellent.  But he appears to write at a fairly stately pace, reminiscent of Thomas Harris, so the books are few and far between.

Rose of Tibet tells the story of Charles Houston, a footloose school teacher who goes to India in 1950 in search of his half brother who disappeared along with several other members of a film crew.  Houston discovers that the film crew vanished into Tibet, which is facing tremendous pressure from Communist China.  Houston secures a Sherpa guide & makes his own illegal entry into the forbidden country.  He proceeds to get involved with ancient prophecies, religious disputes, Chinese/Tibetan political clashes and four sacks of emeralds.

Were it not for a truly ponderous narrative structure, the story is told by a fictional Lionel Davidson who is a book editor, this would be a thriller of the highest rank.  As is, it scores a tier below Davidson's own high standard as set in Kolymsky Heights which I highly recommend.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B+)

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