The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny, Mellissa Fung
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: political thriller, suspense, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Length: 13 hours and 16 minutes
Published by Minotaur Books on May 12, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A standalone thriller co-written by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Gamache series and an award-winning journalist.
In a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines. Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese-American, is an erstwhile food blogger who has lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li. A Chinese dissident who escaped China after Tiananmen Square, Vivien is now a globally recognized human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China.
When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can decode the Chinese intentions.
While it makes some sense that the President would turn to Vivien, since she regularly advises world leaders on the actions of today’s Chinese government, what isn’t clear is why they’d want to talk to Alice.
After looking at the evidence, Vivien says that the only thing worse than the Chinese government being behind it, is if they are not. It would mean, she explains, that some clandestine element within China is calling the shots. That the President of China has lost control. And an unstable China cannot be good for anyone.
Or perhaps that’s exactly what the shrewd old politician wants everyone to think.
Caught up in the chaos, Vivien and Alice are uniquely placed to stop the next, cataclysmic attack. But there are forces deep within both the American and Chinese governments intent on stopping mother and daughter. The estranged pair, who excels at misunderstanding each other, must figure out how to work together.
The increasingly frantic search for answers takes the women from the Oval Office to an office building in Akron, Ohio, from the noodle shops of Hong Kong to the necropolis of the first emperor. Along the way they must decode an old legend, and an old language invented by women, for women.
The Last Mandarin is an electrifying study of absolute power and voracious greed, political terror and personal conviction. But it is also, as to be expected from the minds of Louise Penny, beloved author of the Gamache novels, and Mellissa Fung, an acclaimed international journalist, an intimate examination of choice, of sacrifice, of memory and myths, both cultural and personal. It is the story of a mother and daughter, as well as a compelling international thriller about the precarious balance of power across the world, and within a family. And what happens when both break down.

My Review:

The Last Mandarin is a bit of a “six impossible things before breakfast” kind of story. Then again, our perspective on the frequently insane events of this tale is named Alice – and she often doesn’t believe what’s happening either, even while she’s in the midst of experiencing it.

Especially while she’s experiencing it.

The story begins with food blogger Alice Li in the restaurant of one of Washington D.C.’s premier hotels, watching resentfully as seemingly everyone in the room sidles up to the table to pay homage to her mother Vivien. Vivien Li, a refugee from the People’s Republic of China just after the 1989 protest and massacre at Tiananmen Square, has made a name and reputation for herself in the U.S. as a renowned human rights activist, an outspoken speaker against the communist regime that continues to control and suppresses the people of her homeland and an expert on the politics and history of the country she fled.

Alice has spent her entire life in her mother’s shadow, never measuring up to whatever unspoken plans and ambitions her mother had for her. Alice is still standing in Vivien’s shadow, dragged along in her mother’s wake, when every single alarm and warning system on the entire planet – and the space surrounding it – goes off at once. Everywhere, all at once.

And Vivien – with Alice in tow – is dragged from the hotel to the White House to speak to the members of the President’s inner circle about the source of what can only be considered an attack. Because whoever did this, however they accessed every warning system everywhere, including the space station in orbit and literally all the civilian and even military ships at sea, did it from somewhere in China.

Not that the country of China was exempt from what happened. Only that someone there must know something. And that Vivien – or one of the President’s advisors – should have seen it coming. But they didn’t.

All they have is one last text from one of Alice’s old college friends. She thought Liam was just a fellow food blogger, but his message was clearly more – and so was he. Whether he was a spy, a double agent, or merely an agent of Vivien Li’s own private spy network is something yet to be determined.

But Alice Li is determined to find out what really happened. As well as with figure out who, and what, her mother really is. It might make more of a difference than either Vivien or Alice can imagine if Vivien can manage to look past her own hubris to understand who her daughter really is, and what she’s really capable of, as well.

Before it’s too late.

Escape Rating A: This story is more than a bit of a wild ride. It’s the kind of story that the late Tom Clancy used to right, filled with paranoid plots, insane situations, mutually assured destruction brinksmanship, and the potential end of the world as we know it. (That Clancy is both dead and still publishing new books fits right in, as that’s just as impossible as much of both his – and this – story.)

But the impossibilities are in the details, and in the characters who find themselves thrust into the position where they are the only ones who CAN save the world. Even as the people who believe they are the powers-that-be gibber in paranoia and delusions and paranoid delusions that might even be partially true, worrying about vast hidden conspiracies and whether or not they’ll be blamed for the destruction.

The idea that the world is much more vulnerable than we think it is, and that world leaders are simultaneously afraid of each other – with reason – and have more in common with their enemy counterparts than their own people, can be, and probably is, both counter to what we believe AND entirely true. (That concept comes straight out of old Cold War espionage stories, where the enemy agents in the same situations understood each other better than the folks back home understood them – and vice very much versa.)

Again, even if the details of this story seem over-the-top. Which they mostly are.

At the same time, it’s easy to see co-author Louise Penny’s fingerprints all over the way this story works. There’s an ongoing thread through her beloved Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries in regards to hidden, deeply rooted, long buried, patiently waiting gigantic conspiracies. And that’s exactly what’s at the heart of this story – even if their motives are different from Gamache’s usual run of antagonists.

Because the story here combines human and political plausibilities and possibilities with the implausibility of its heroes and historical antecedents which careens hard into Dan Brown and the arcane, hidden historical meanings and implanted codes of, well, The Da Vinci Code.

And it’s that juxtaposition of the likely with the quirky and otherwise downright impossible that readers will either fall into in fascination or bounce off of hard and fast.

I fell hard, for the most part. I loved the conspiracy theories and the historical underpinnings. The strained relationship between Chinese dissident turned civil rights activist Vivien Li and her resentful adult daughter Alice grounded the story in the real even more than the plot wrapped around the real-world bogeyman of artificial intelligence run amok in cyberspace.

The way that the new conspiracy is steeped in the myths and legends of Chinese history will either captivate readers or push them out of the story. I love those kinds of details, but reading mileage definitely varies.

Readers who set aside their disbelief, or at least let it rest for a while, will enjoy The Last Mandarin a great deal. It’s the kind of espionage thriller that we don’t see nearly as much of as we used to. In that sense, and in its choice of foci and protagonists, it reminds me a bit of The Silver Fish as well as both Clancy and several of M.L. Buchman’s series, particularly his Miranda Chase series.

It’s also a story that is even better in audio. I listened to Eunice Wong’s narration – she’s a great reader for Alice – and got so caught up in her reading that I was up until 3 am finishing the audio instead of switching to text and wrapping up in a single hour. It was worth it.

So if you can wrap your willing suspension of disbelief around this combination of implausible heroes and not nearly as insane as we’d like them to be conspiracy plots, The Last Mandarin is a fascinating and fantastic read. In multiple senses of both words!