The Nine Fold Heaven by Mingmei Yip... A Review

The Nine Fold Heaven by Mingmei Yip is the allure of Shanghai, with a twist of funny. Sexy and passionate painted upon a canvas of Chinese folklore, ghosts and dreams. This is all you can expect and more from Mingmei Yip's most recent book, The Nine Fold Heaven. The story centers around Camilla, and her quest to find her lost lover and baby. A baby that she thinks may be alive, even though she was told he died in childbirth. But her baby visits her in her dreams and gives her cryptic messages, and so her quest begins. But Camilla is no ordinary Chinese girl, she's been trained many years to be a sly covert spy by one of the most powerful gang leaders in Shanghai. She is beautiful, a woman who knows how to seduce any man, a talented singer,  pretty good with a knife and funny. Camilla will lead you on a journey through the exotic underworld of Shanghai, to an adventure that will surely grab you and have you turning those pages faster than a cherry blossom fades.

I am never disappointed with Mingmei Yip's writing. It is simply wonderful. Her stories are always an adventure, with exotic settings, and with a heroine that is so real, with flaws & feelings that the reader can always relate to. AND her stories are fun! Her female protagonists always have a fiery independent attitude graced with the humility to manipulate her situations.

Camilla, is from her previous book, Skeleton Women, where we first meet her as an orphaned girl living in Shanghai. She is adopted and brought up in luxurious surroundings, but as she finds out later, there is a cost to everything. And as she develops into the beautiful and talented woman she was meant to be, she finds out what that cost will be. And I just love that Mingmei brought Camilla back in another story! Don't you wish more authors would do that with great characters?! But even though Camilla's origins are in a previous story, you do not have to read the previous book to thoroughly enjoy this book. The Nine Fold Heaven is a stand alone read. (But if you like Camilla as much as I do, you'll want to read more of her anyway!)

What more can I say except that I loved The Nine Fold Heaven!  I want to thank Mingmei Yip for sending along a copy of The Nine Fold Heaven for review! It is always a pleasure to crack the spine on any of her books.

The Nine Fold Heaven is available on Kindle, Nook and in Paperback , all published by Kensington Books. (BTW, Skeleton Women is at a Kindle Bargain price of $2.99 right now if you wanted to read Camilla from her start.)

Here are a couple of links to my first interview with Mingmei Yip in April 2011, and my review of her book, Song of the Silk Road.