When Mercy Chan washes up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money, and no memories, the only refuge she finds is the infamous, ghost-infested slum of Kowloon Walled City. Since then, she has rebuilt her life, working for the local triad as a ghost talker and dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt the district. The filthy gutters and cramped alleyways of Kowloon have become her home.

But the past Mercy can't remember isn't done with her. An unusually powerful ghost has infested Kowloon's waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. It claims to know Mercy-and secrets from her past that are best left forgotten.

As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realize that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making.

In The Girl of a Thousand Faces, Sunyi Dean has created a unique ghost story, complex, rich and full of the history of Hong Kong. Mercy Chan is an intriguing character, one that is no longer young and with a complicated past. As the story evolves, her past is slowly revealed and the truth emerges.

Sunyi Dean peels away the layers of Mercy's secrets like peeling an onion, one snip at a time. Her approach to the story allows different points of view to converge, for the trauma and pain to reveal itself in Mercy and in others. The novel is very much about the cycles of pain and trauma but also about learning and forgiveness. The complexity and layers to the story are engaging and kept me as a reader absorbed in the novel.

If you like unique ghost stories, with malignant spirits and complex history, this novel is for you. Mercy is complex, the characters around her are interesting and the fight Mercy faces is far more involved than even I suspected. I loved the layers of the story and the themes of trauma and forgiveness explored in this book. It is a supernatural feast that wows intellectually and emotionally.

Rating: 5 out of 5 storms. ~~ Andrea Rittschof

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