SHANGHAI, 1937. Someone has killed the Yellow Swan

Who murdered that beautiful, beguiling, erotic half-Japanese, half-Chinese nightclub singer with whom all of Shanghai is enthralled.

Was it one of her jealous lovers? Was it the nearby, hovering Japanese military who thought she was a spy for the Chinese? Or was it the Chinese who thought she was a spy for the Japanese?

As July’s heat and humidity wrap themselves around the city, and suck the energy from Shanghai’s Chinese, Japanese, and British communities, tensions steadily rise. The Japanese military is looking for any excuse to occupy Shanghai and to promote its plan to conquer Asia. Will the murder of its national – the Yellow Swan – give the army the Incident it has been looking for?

Not if Sun-jin has anything to say about it. Solving the murder becomes Sun-jin’s race against the clock.

As Sun-jin rushes to identify the Yellow Swan’s killer – with the clock ticking down and with obstacle after obstacle springing up to block him – he takes us through the exotic world of Shanghai in 1937, with its back-alley informants, its all-night entertainment clubs, its sing-song girls, its crime bosses, and its criminal triads.

Watching through Sun-jin’s eyes, we experience – in this mystery full of twists and turns – the best and the worst aspects of this pleasure-mad, strife-ridden city, as it teeters on the brink of World War II.