The Arresting Eye opens by recounting the London Metropolitan Police's 2005 murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot numerous times in the head sitting on a train at a station as shocked commuters looked on. Mr. Menezes's crime? None. A Brazilian citizen, Menezes was mistaken for suspected terrorist Hussain Osman, an Ethiopian-born British citizen. Jinny Huh uses this horrifying case of misidentification to emphasize the high stakes of the interconnectedness of race, racial profiling, and surveillance in our post-9/11 world and to lay out the “current state of race detective paranoia” when race is not easily discernible (1–2). The book probes numerous questions related to the anxieties produced by detecting (and, especially, failing to detect) race, including many raised by the dissolution of certain color lines: how, for instance, is race to be determined if it is no longer phenotypically obvious? Huh conducts this investigation through analysis of the intersection of two literary genres – detective fiction and passing narratives – from the nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries.

Following on from Betsy Huang's argument in Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2010), Huh argues that genre fiction “has the potential to reject and rewrite conventional rules” (11), including rules of racial standing and of racial identification. She persuasively supports that thesis through her analyses of detective fictions and passing narratives, grouped together by historical moment: late nineteenth century, the years between World Wars I and II, and late twentieth–early twenty-first centuries. Huh looks primarily at racial anxieties within a black–white–Asian triangulation, but her methods could certainly be applied to other racial formations as well. The fiction examined in this book includes Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Yellow Face” (1893 – a Sherlock Holmes story), Pauline Hopkins's “Talma Gordon” (1900) and Hagar's Daughter (1901–2), several of Winnifred Eaton's so-called Japanese romances, and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan books (and the films based on them). The introduction includes an interpretation of Toni Morrison's “Recitatif” (1983) and the concluding chapter moves among Battlestar Galactica (2004–9), advice columns, and the infamous 1993 Time magazine cover of a computer-generated portrait of “the new face of America.” Along the way, Huh touches on many other popular-culture artifacts, including some hard-boiled fiction.

The breadth of The Arresting Eye is both its strength and its weakness. That is, Huh tackles a huge swath of popular culture; the multiple ways that race detection (as well as undetection) figures in these diverse texts together powerfully illustrate the centrality of race anxiety to numerous narratives. Indeed, by the end of the book, it is hard to think of any popular text in which race (un)detection does not figure at all. However, because Huh deals with comparatively few actual detective fictions, the book is less useful than it might have been, its argument diluted in some ways by the very breadth of the works analyzed. Then, too, most of the material Huh covers is American, but of course the Doyle story is not, and is the one non-American text Huh includes. Valuable as the chapter on “The Yellow Face” is to a student of detective fiction in general and to Sherlock Holmes scholars in particular, conditions in England at the end of the nineteenth century were far different from those obtaining in the US, and so the chapter seems anomalous here, as if imported from another project. Further, the absence of any detective texts from the final period Huh examines (late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries) is a glaring omission. It is also difficult to understand, given how many detective fictions of the period are in fact also passing narratives, beginning with Walter Mosley's White Butterfly (1992). I wish Huh had either excluded the chapter on Sherlock Holmes or incorporated more British fiction into the book; I also wish she had examined recent detective fictions before branching out to television programs and other texts.

Those criticisms aside, Jinny Huh here makes an important contribution both to genre studies and to our understanding of how “racial knowledge” operates at different moments in history. The strongest of the five strong chapters after the introduction – itself well worth reading – is perhaps the fourth, “Jaundiced Eyes: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero.” The Charlie Chan books have come in for much criticism over the years, but Huh avoids getting trapped in old controversies and instead peels back layer upon layer of race detection anxieties in the texts that no other critic has previously addressed. Given that I found each of the chapters more compelling on its own than when considered as part of a coherent, unified argument across the chapters, I am tempted to recommend this book as a collection of articles rather than as a monograph. Huh's arguments about the texts she examines are powerful and revealing.