CANDICE: Welcome to Cracker Croakers for Friday, January 25, 2019. I'm Candice Bergeron, your hostess with the mostest. Colton is on an extended weekend in Belize. Must be a charmed life some of us live Buddy-Boy. For today's show, I thought I'd share with our audience a recent little treasure I discovered.

Colton and I are both avid readers of many different genres. One of my favorite is a good whodunit. A Holmes-esque plot, Chinese lore overtones, Confucian virtues, and mythical creatures combine to produce a sumptuous garden maze called The Night Tiger.

Quick-witted and ambitious, Ji Lin is the female main character of this novel. She's also stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, and moonlights as a dancehall girl, to assist in paying off her mother's mahjong debts. A gruesome souvenir drags Ji Lin into a world of superstitions and dark secrets.

In the meantime, Ren, the Chinese houseboy, and main male character of the novel, is tasked with finding his dead master's severed finger to prevent him the dread of wandering the earth alone forever. He has 49 days to accomplish his mission, and the clock is running. As days pass by, unexplained deaths, and men who turn into tigers, dot the landscape. Throw in a healthy dose of modern idealism, forbidden love, as well as sibling rivalry, and The Night Tiger becomes a dazzling, propulsive read.

The novel's author, Yangsze Choo, was born in Malaysia, speaks with a British accent, and grew up in exotic locales like the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, and Germany. She enjoys jolting conversations with comments such as "scamper on a treadmill like a hamster". She also likes the Cafe Restaurant app that offers the clink and murmur of a coffee shop so writers don't feel lonely while they pen their masterpieces.

Set in colonial Malaya of the 1930s, The Night Tiger lurks in a thicketed underbrush of unresolved murders and mysteries. Choo draws on her parents as sources of several of the fables winding their way through the fabric of her novel. She explained this feature in a recent interview.

YANGSZE CHOW: Growing up I realized that there was very little literature on Malaya. And, what there was was primarily written by British writers like Somerset Maugham.

CANDICE: For our audience members who may not know, Somerset Maugham wrote the classic novel Of Human Bondage.

YANGZSE CHOO: Having my mom's stories about her friend the maid, I thought there is a whole other story about the local people.

CANDICE: One of my favorite parts of The Night Tiger details with how Ren, who is haunted by the death of his twin brother, services his master who believes he turns into a murderous weretiger. The doctor dispatches Ren to serve a guilt-ridden reprobate who is also a British surgeon. At that location, deadly tiger attacks begin occurring.

Yangsze Choo created her Ji Lin character from an unpublished novel she spent eight years writing but keeps hidden away believing it's not worthy of publication. In the interview I mentioned earlier, she stated:

YANGSZE CHOO: While researching that failed novel, I read a book by an author who wrote about visiting a strange dancehall where all the girls were for hire but afterward were strictly segregated. It was weirdly prudish.

CANDICE: Choo magnificently monopolizes that strangeness in The Night Tiger. By bringing Ji Lin and Ren together, Choo creates an intricate and rich novel. However, one of the most enjoyable pleasures of the book is its remarkable understory in the unbalanced relationship between the British and their servants. And, Choo's themes concerning the Chinese fascination with lucky numbers adds another ambiance to the story. Let her explain:

YANGSZE CHOO: Their belief that certain rituals would guarantee you happiness was in the back of my mind.

CANDICE: The traditional Confucian virtues Choo named her characters after were too.

YANGSZE CHOO: I'm not that clever, but it's curious how my characters have become the opposites of those virtues.

CANDICE: Choo's abiding interest in the nature of twins deepens the storyline.

YANGSZE CHOO: The idea is interesting because this whole novel is about different worlds such as natives and colonials, the world of night and the world of day, the world of the living and the world of the dead. It's about a lot of our unresolved fears.

CANDICE: Published by Flatiron Publishers, The Night Tiger is a fascinating 384-page read. There is also an audio, and an eBook, version of this historical fiction novel available. You can find The Night Tiger under the ISBN of 9781250175458.

That about wraps us up for this edition of Cracker Croakers. However, I invite you to join Colton and I again on Monday for another entertaining edition of Cracker Croakers (Featuring Candice and Colton). That's if we can get Colton to return from his weekend jaunt to Belize. I'm so envious! Maybe he'll at least bring me back a hand-woven intricately designed Mayan basket. That would be so nice of him. I don't know if his new main squeeze Veronica would like it very well, but one can always hope.