And The City Swallowed Them…The 2008 Diana O’Brien Murder in Shanghai

Shanghai based journalist Mara Hvistendahl has done a solid job of work reconstructing the events around the 2008 murder of the Canadian model Diana O’Brien in her new e-book And the City Swallowed Them… Hvistendahl’s retelling of the horrific murder, the seedy underbelly of the Chinese modelling business, the police investigation and the underlying tensions in Shanghai on the eve of the 2008 Olympics is excellently done and revealing (as someone living a stone’s throw from the murder scene in 2008 all that permeated out was rumour and supposition at the time).

At age 22, Diana O’Brien left a small island community on Canada’s Pacific Coast and moved to China to work as a model. Twelve days later, she was stabbed in a Shanghai stairwell. The actions of both police investigators and O’Brien’s Chinese modeling agent soon aroused suspicion as her family sought answers from China’s opaque legal system. Ultimately, their quest would put them face to face with her accused killer.

At once a page-turning murder mystery and a work of deep investigation, And The City Swallowed Them is a true crime nonfiction story based on dozens of interviews with investigators, models, and both the victim’s and the convicted murderer’s families. The short book moves from Shanghai’s back alleys to the seedy underbelly of high fashion, where young models travel alone to strange cities, often with falsified work papers, and sleep ten to an apartment between cover shoots. Set against the backdrop of Shanghai’s explosive urbanization, the work also explores the world of China’s liudong renkou, or floating population, where the hopes of newcomers from poor villages often turn to dust—leading some to horribly desperate acts.

The debut digital title from the writers cooperative Deca, And The City Swallowed Them overturns assumptions about both China’s feared justice system, where the conviction rate for criminals is 99.9 percent, and the glamorous world of international modeling. More than a murder tale, And The City Swallowed Them lays bare the powerful forces that send two families on a collision course from distant sides of the Pacific.