The Style

The Turquoise Dragon will appeal to a crossover audience. Its steadily rising action and bursts of violence will attract fans of the thriller/chase genre, while its use of richly-detailed Paris locations, coupled with its layered musical and literary allusions and fully realized characters, offer much for a non-traditional reader.

Paris as a character

While Turquoise Dragon will never replace Lonely Planet as a guidebook, it was the authors' intention from the beginning to write the Paris scenes so that readers could, if they chose, take the book to Paris and follow precisely in the footsteps of the characters.

Crafting these scenes in this way allows Paris itself to come alive as a character in Turquoise Dragon: when, for instance, Shaun O'Connor sees a particular monument in a park while walking a certain path through the city, that's because that monument is truly there. The authors have walked each street our characters walk...have sat in the actual cafes...have wandered the same cemetery alleys – and any reader of the book will be able to do the same, and will be able to see the city the way our characters do.

The meaning of music

Music is nearly as much of a character as Paris in Turquoise Dragon: the plot is borne along by references to the classical nocturnes of Frederic Chopin and Lili Boulanger, and, critically, by the words of Jim Morrison in The Doors' The End.

These words swirl through Li Jiang's mind as he walks the labyrinthine paths of Pere Lachaise cemetery, taking him back to days of war in the jungles of Vietnam...and driving him toward a life-changing meeting with a bloodied Delphine Moreau.

Beneath the Mirabeau Bridge...

While not a literary novel, Turquoise Dragon draws extensively on literary techniques and styling to deepen the story's narrative without slowing it down.

Particularly important to the plot is Guillaume Apollinaire's poem Mirabeau Bridge and its refrain that "Time passed is past/Love will not come again/Beneath the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine" – a refrain that is true for some characters, bitterly ironic for others, and meaningful to them all in its foreshadowing of the story's tragic climax.