The Last Mandarin

 

I almost skipped this one. I was so wrong. 

Thank you Macmillan Audio for the gifted early listen!

Louise Penny writing about AI and global terrorism wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card. Neither was enjoying every second of it.

I almost talked myself out of this one. A political thriller co-written by Louise Penny and journalist Melissa Fung? I was bracing for something slow and dense. Instead, I got a very propulsive listens I’ve had in months.

The Last Mandarin opens with a bang — security and fire alarms going off simultaneously all over the world, the signal traced back to China.  In the chaos, mother and daughter Vivien and Alice Li are called to the White House. Vivien is a Tiananmen Square dissident turned world-renowned human rights activist. Alice is a first-generation Chinese-American food blogger who has spent most of her life in her mother’s shadow. They can barely stand each other. Now they have to save the world together.

The globe-trotting pace kept me locked in: the Oval Office, the noodle shops of Hong Kong, the necropolis of the first emperor.  The blend of ancient Chinese history, from the Terracotta Warriors to a secret language invented by women,

woven into a modern AI techno-thriller was genuinely clever and fun. Is every plot point totally believable? No. But that’s not really the point. This is pure entertainment done well.

What I loved most was watching Alice grow into herself. She starts the story completely in Vivien’s shadow and ends it somewhere very different. The mother-daughter dynamic felt real even when everything around them was wild.

And narrator Eunice Wong is exceptional. Large cast, multiple languages, constant tension and she handled all of it. This is exactly the kind of audiobook that makes you wish your commute was longer. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Out May 12th.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton.