Personal Stumper SOLVED!!!!

This is a lesson in the importance of keywords. I have had two ongoing personal stumpers--books I read when I was younger that I can't remember pertinent info about for the life of me. I've tried to do searches for them before with no real results. One is a young adult novel that must have been published in the late '70s or '80s. It's about kids at a school. Some of them are freakish - one girl in particular is a type of beast. It turns into a war, children who live in the sewers may or may not be enlisted, and in the end the freaks win--but with casualties. The girl who is a beast is turned into a statue or stuffed and mounted.

I still can't figure out how to find that one, save going to my old library and hoping it hasn't been weeded. (Fat chance.)

The second is a series of mysteries set in China--they were long and sort of funny and slightly mystical. For a long time I kept doing the "mystery set in China" or "chinese mystery" search and turning up nothing. But today I realized I should be doing a search for "detective" and "China". Which I did, in Novelist (an essential database, may I add). And I found my answer: The Master Li novels of Barry Hughart. A Google image search confirms that the covers of these books are what I remember. But I'm putting a copy on hold just to make sure.