Böcker av Robert Van Gulik

Judge Dee is about to step into the shoes of a dead man¿Most people would refuse the job of Magistrate at the lonely port town of Peng-lai ¿ especially as the last occupant of the post has been found poisoned in his library, his papers missing. But Judge Dee is not most men. He arrives ready to get to the truth, only to find his life complicated even further by a missing bride, a vanished artisan, a man-eating tiger and an evil conspiracy.

On a wooded hill in the Lan-fang district, a phantom stalks in a century-old Buddhist temple and three mysteries unfold - the vanishing of a wealthy merchant's daughter, the disappearance of twenty bars of gold, and the discovery of a decapitated corpse. In The Phantom of the Temple, the clever Judge Dee pieces together these strange occurrences to reveal one complex and gruesome plot.

"The Monkey and The Tiger" includes two detective stories, "The Morning of the Monkey" and "The Night of the Tiger." In the first, a gibbon drops an emerald in the open gallery of Dee's official residence, leading the judge to discover a strangely mutilated body in the woods--and how it got there. In the second, Dee is traveling to the imperial capital to assume a new position when he is separated from his escort by a flood. Marooned in a large country house surrounded by fierce bandits, Dee confronts an apparition that helps him solve a mystery.

Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. To connect crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox.

In this, the second book in Robert van Gulik's classic mystery series of ancient China, Judge Dee must look into the murder of his predecessor. His job is complicated by the simultaneous disappearance of his chief clerk and the new bride of a wealthy local shipowner.Meanwhile, a tiger is terrorizing the district, the ghost of the murdered magistrate stalks the tribunal, a prostitute has a secret message for Dee, and the body of a murdered monk is discovered to be in the wrong grave. In the end, the judge, with his deft powers of deduction, uncovers the one cause for all of these seemingly unrelated events.

The Abbot of a Taoist Monastery is dead after delivering an ecstatic sermon. The monks call it a supernatural experience, but the judge calls it murder. Recalling the allegedly accidental deaths of three young women in the same monastery, Judge Dee seeks clues in the eyes of a cat to solve cases of impersonation and murder.

Judge Dee has been appointed emergency governor of the plague- and drought-ridden Imperial City. As his guards help the city fend off a popular uprising, an aristocrat from one of the oldest families in China suffers an 'accident' in a deserted mansion.

A chance encounter with Autumn Moon, the most powerful courtesan on Paradise Island, leads Judge Dee to investigate three deaths. Although he finally teases the true story from a tangled history of passion and betrayal, Dee is saddened by the perversion, corruption, and waste of the world "of flowers and willows" that thrives on prostitution.

On the night of the Poo-yang dragonboat races in AD 699 a drummer in the leading boat collapses, and the body of a woman turns up in a country mansion. Judge Dee steps in to investigate the murders. He discovers that these two deaths are connected by an ancient tragedy involving a treasure stolen from the Imperial Harem one hundred years earlier.

Judge Dee presided over his Imperial Chinese court with a brand of Confucian justice. A near-mythic figure in China, he distinguished himself as a tribunal magistrate, inquisitor, and public avenger. This book contains eight short stories which cover a decade during which the judge served in four different provinces of the Tang Empire.

In his attempts to solve three perplexing murders, Judge Dee uncovers a plot to take over key positions in the Tang government.