Ruth Rendell was a product of her time. Still, by the early 80s I knew that the L-for-R switch to connote a native Chinese speaker using English was at best cringe and generally unacceptable - and I was a tween, not an established novelist. This may have colors my view of Speaker of Mandarin but beyond that, it's not Rendell's best.
Inspector Wexford is on a tour of China. He's supposedly there s part of his London detective nephew's retinue, discussing policing, but once established, Rendell drops this. He's dealing with a stereotypically devoted party member guide and attached to a tour group from the UK. He's also hallucinating a woman old enough to have bound feet following him.
A few months later, Wexford is called to investigate the death of one of the tourists he met in China. adela Knighton was shot at point blank range in the back of her head, and her jewelry is missing. While Mike Burden investigates the tour group and potentially disgruntled patients of Alan Knighton, Wexford focuses on her family, gaining insight from her lifelong friend.
The Knighton "had" to get married, and for years it was an outwardly satisfactory arrangement - Adela raised their four children while Alan rose in his career. In her friend's words, though, Adela "only had a husband in the sense that he slept next to her." Then, something changed.
None of this seems to connect and it doesn't play into the solution. Both the "hallucination" (which, of course, has a much better explanation than too much green tea) and the murder are solved by coincidence and not ones that are particularly interesting. i try to read entire series, but if you're wandering around the Wexford novels, you can probably skip Speaker of Mandarin.
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