Critical acclaim ranks THE SKULL MANTRA with Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow as a novel as much about a people and a place--the Tibetans of the high Himalayas--as it is a gripping thriller. Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, author Eliot Pattison masterfully scales the heights of the genre, taking readers to the top of the world while he chills us to the bone...<p>The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending Beijing. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people's desperate fight for its sacred mountains and the Chinese regime's blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is inn