"At 1600 hours on the fifteenth a body was discovered. Five hundred feet above the Dragon Throat Bridge. The unidentified victim was dressed expensively, in cashmere and Western denim... Two surgical scars on his abdomen. No other identifying marks."

Identifying, like a head. Cashmere and denim. Western denim. He could be an American. But this is not America. This is Tibet.

Discovered on a remote mountainside by a work gang, the gulag's Buddhist monks down tools, fearing the handiwork of a "hungry ghost" and regional big-wig Tan is forced to enlist the help of Shan Tao Yun in his search. But Shan - for now and the foreseeable - is part of that prison gang himself; sentenced for embarrassing the Beijing Party.

Comparisons to Ecco's The Name of The Rose are a little fatuous. For all its apparent exoticism - occupying Chinese forces, Tibetan sorcerers, Buddhist resistance fighters - there's a mundane "literary" thriller at the heart of all this. Murders, as Shan points out, are usually, "the result of one of two underlying forces. Passion. Or politics." The Skull Mantra, sadly, is an idea in search of a plot. Just because you can transplant criminal shenanigans to an alien land doesn't mean you should. (Further evidence: Martin Limon's pitiful Jade Lady Burning.)

Eliot Pattison's the non-fiction author of numerous works on "international policy" and it shows. His prose is adequate but dry, dialogue little more than functional. Put the emphasis on thriller, not literary. You'll probably like it. I didn't.