Political dynamics are the same everywhere. It is the high stakes and the culture of secrecy that make Chinese politics so particularly intriguing. "A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel" is the best book so far on the riveting political drama of 2012, by combining murder, stacks of money, sex and fast cars (and even, sex in fast cars), all at a time when the complex machinery of China's Communist Party was selecting its new leaders. The book's title makes it sound like a formulaic detective novel. But it is really an insightful account of this true political story, and it uses compelling profiles of the main players to explain the context and its tremendous implications for the world's most populous country.

I used to cover Chinese politics as a journalist, and I no longer follow the bland pronouncements made by Chinese bureaucrats, who look virtually indistinguishable from one another. But I got hooked on this story when the news broke that the chief of police in Chongqing had gone to the U.S. Consulate in Sichuan Province to ask for asylum, saying he had evidence that his boss's wife had murdered an Englishman. His boss was Bo Xilai, an ambitious and charismatic leader who had been building a left-leaning political brand that made his competitors in Beijing nervous. Right there, I knew there had to be a pretty interesting backstory.

Indeed, there was. And thank goodness, it takes some telling. A brawny power struggle always requires a good explanation of the political landscape and the main players in the drama. Pin Ho is an experienced journalist in Hong Kong, and his narrative is interspersed with moments when players in this drama called or texted him to leak information or try to get coverage furthering a particular viewpoint. He had a close-up view, but he was mystified how to put the pieces of the puzzle together while the story was still unfolding. When he and co-author Wenguang Huang sat down to write, it probably wasn't easy to decide how to structure the story. They chose to tell it through the main characters.

At the center is Bo Xilai, who grew up in a privileged family of Communist Party royalty, his father a lieutenant of Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Young Bo had smarts and good looks, and the ambition and ability to move his way up. He eventually became the boss in Chongqing, one of China's megacities with a population of 32 million. Bo espoused a special brand of populist politics, with nostalgia for Mao, all the while socking away tens of millions of dollars and bedding a stream of young Chinese starlets, including an attractive network news anchorwoman. His son went to Harrow, and then Harvard, and had enough cash to buy high-end sports cars without a financing plan. There was help from a British businessman-cum-fixer, Neil Haywood, who apparently grew an inflated sense of self-importance, pretending to friends that he was a British secret agent, and finally demanding a bigger cut of all that money. He's the one who ends up dead, poisoned, in the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

Then there is the wife, Gu Kailai, who seems to fit into a long line of villainous vixens in Chinese history. She had sharp cheekbones and spiky hair. She was demanding and high-strung. Trained as a lawyer, she had her fingers in many ventures and it is hard for the authors to figure out exactly where her husband fit in to all of them. The Communist Party put her on a public trial for the murder, while her husband languished under house arrest.

The other strands of political intrigue spread throughout Beijing. One of the most revealing involves Ling Jihua, chief of staff to the outgoing President of China. Ling's son died when his speeding Ferrari crashed on a Beijing street at 2 A.M. with two naked women in the front seat, apparently taking part in a familiar activity by China's young elite. But when Ling, the father, went to identify the body, he denied that it belonged to his son, knowing that an admission would end his own career. Of course, when the cover-up is revealed, it was doubly damning. It always is.

Any tale of political intrigue that includes murder and betrayal, on the stage of a political transition, inevitably invites the question about how much was orchestrated by people in power. In a secretive political culture, it is hard to prove anything for sure. But my guess is: not much was made up here. The police chief's plea for asylum to the Americans, and the death of an Englishman, made it difficult for China's leaders to keep the story secret. Instead, the authorities seem to have used a genuine scandal for their own political purposes - to identify a common enemy that they could rally all Party members against, and hold him up as a symbol of the corrupt excesses that the Party is theoretically trying to fight, just as they were preparing to champion new leadership. Bo fit that bill. In politics, timing and luck are almost everything. We will never know what might have happened had a few cards fallen in a different way.