Lisa See - "The Flower Net"

 

A better than average thriller. Not only an excellent plot but a great insight into the last days of the Mao Tse Tung dybasty. The first body was found in ice: the U.S. ambassador's son, entombed in a frozen lake outside Beijing's Forbidden City. Thousands of miles away, in the heat-baked hold of a Chinese smuggling ship, another corpse is uncovered, this one a red Prince, a scion of China's political elite. Suspecting the deaths are linked, the American and Chinese governments pair ambitious attorney David Stark and brilliant detective Liu Hulan to uncover a killer and a conspiracy. From the teeming streets of Beijing to Los Angeles and back, David and Liu are caught in a perilous net of politics, organized crime, family loyalties, and their own passion. As, one by one, those close to the investigation are killed, David and Hulan face a firestorm of evil, while the killer they seek is as close as the secrets they keep from each other.

LISA SEE has been a journalist for many years writing for, among others, the LA Times, the Washington Post and Cosmopolitan, and was, until recently, the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly.