The Phantom of the Temple: A Judge Dee Mystery

Judge Dee is a detective (a magistrate) in seventh century China. The Judge Dee books are excellent mystery novels and fascinating history books. If you like mystery novels mixed with some wonderful history, these books are for you.

A great book by a very good sinologist. Best thing the communists did to him was to put him under house arrest when he was there as a dutch diplomat. If you love historical detective fiction, you will love this

The Phantom of the Temple begins with the strange discovery of a severed head and an accompanying body in an abandoned Buddhist Temple. Oddly, the severed head does not belong to the decapitated body. The respected Judge Dee is brought in to resolve this mystery. A simple murder soon turns into a complicated tale of theft, kidnapping and heresy. One of the pleasures of reading mystery novels is that they are a window into another time and place. There is no better tour guide into this foreign realm than a detective. The detective can go anywhere and ask any question. In "The Phantom of the Temple" our guide to Seventh Century China is chief magistrate, Judge Dee. The venerable Judge Dee is the creation of the noted Sinologist, Robert Van Gulik and he is the lead character in seventeen mystery novels. "The Phantom of the Temple" was first published in 1966 and is still in print. In the turbulent world of mystery fiction, it is a rarity to see a mystery novel still published after forty two years. The series survives because Judge Dee is a great creation and more importantly because Seventh Century China is such a different world. This is my first foray into the Judge Dee series and I look forward to reading as many of them as I can find. Highly recommended.

But an abandoned temple with gold hidden in it. Murders happened around the gold, and there was a phantom dressed in white wandering in the temple...

A storm forces Judge Dee to stay overnight in a Taoist temple. There he finds he must investigate the poisoning of one religious young woman, the disappearance of two other women, a possible ghost, a possibly murdered abbot, and numerous suspicious living men and women. All his questions are answered, but administering justice strains his moral code.