The Mean Streets of Asia Crime Novels

The FBI says it’s terrorism, but the whispers on the street tell a different story. They say a serial killer is stalking American women in Asia. Singapore CID assigns the case to Inspector Samuel Tay. Tay is something of a reluctant policeman. He’s a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much. Thinking back, he can’t even remember why he became a police detective in the first place. But maybe none of that really matters, because he’s very, very good at what he does.

The first bomb cracked the Hilton like an egg. The second gutted the lobby of the Marriott. And the third peeled the front off of the Grand Hyatt. Three massive explosions, all at American hotels in the heart of the city, and all within a few horrifying seconds. Hundreds are dead and thousands are injured. Singapore is bleeding. Inspector Samuel Tay is a senior inspector in the Special Investigation Section of Singapore CID, but he is frozen out of the investigation from the beginning.

Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he? A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances and a former law partner Shepherd thought was dead reveals himself as the force behind the disgraced bank.

Jack Shepherd was a politically connected American lawyer until he traded the fierce intrigues of Washington for the quiet life of a college professor in Thailand. Everything had been going pretty well for him there, too, at least it had until the day he walked into a bar on the jet-set island of Phuket and found the world’s most famous fugitive waiting for him. Plato Karsarkis was an international celebrity straight out of Vanity Fair until a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Iraqi oil and charged him with racketeering and money laundering.