Asian Mystery Crime Fiction

Bangkok Shadows by Stephen Shaiken

In Bangkok, everyone gets the chance to start over. Few questions are asked. When American criminal defense lawyer Glenn Murray Cohen took a bundle of cash from a murdered client and moved to Thailand and a new life, he thought his troubles were over forever.

For seven years, Glenn enjoys the life of a wealthy expat, forms friendships and seeks love, spending much of his time at the mysterious NJA Club where he pursues the beautiful Noi. This pleasant life is turned upside down when American agents come calling, pressuring him to kidnap a Russian gangster, a dangerous task for which he is woefully unprepared. Glenn is drawn him into an underbelly of corruption, criminal activity and international intrigue hidden in the shadows of Bangkok.

An American In China (series) by Malcolm Bosse

The War Lord: 1927 post-Imperial China.

The Great War has left scars behind, marking the world even a decade after its conclusion. In China, men of British, American, German, Italian, French, and Japanese origin flood into a land recently freed from centuries of Imperial rule, seeing a chance to make a profit and escape the darkness that recently shrouded the world.

Unlike many of his American countrymen, Philip Embree has not come to China for money, but to spread Christianity and the word of God. But when the train on which the young missionary is travelling is hijacked by bandits, he finds himself thrust into a world that he could never have imagined. 

Fire In Heaven: It is 1948 and Mao is beginning his rise to power.

A girl is gone and Philip Embree must find her, or he tells himself. Sonia, the daughter of Philip’s estranged wife, has run away with her lover, Chamlong. But Philip has never been a man of his word.

Let lose in China, he ends up involved in an American scheme and under fire from all sides. And while Philip is getting into trouble, the girl is getting into worse.

Shadow of the Dome: A gripping tale of friendship, duty and destiny in the court of Kublai Khan by Karen Warren

Kokachin is a Mongolian princess, living with her mother and brother at the court of Kublai Khan in China. Her best friends are Tarkhan, the son of the household cook, and a displaced Chinese princess named Mei Lien. Kokachin is active and adventurous, and chafes at being an idle princess. 

Based on true events in the thirteenth century, Shadow of the Dome is a tale of friendship, duty and destiny that will have readers captivated from the very start. 

Red Princess Mysteries by Lisa See

Book 1: Flower Net

In the depths of a Beijing winter, during the waning days of Deng Xiaoping’s reign, the U.S. ambassador’s son is found dead–his body entombed in a frozen lake. Around the same time, aboard a ship adrift off the coast of Southern California, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Stark makes a startling discovery: the corpse of a Red Prince, a scion of China’s political elite. In an investigation that brings them to every corner of China and sparks an intense attraction between the two, David and Hulan discover a web linking human trafficking to the drug trade to governmental treachery–a web reaching from the Forbidden City to the heart of Los Angeles and, like the wide flower net used by Chinese fishermen, threatening to ensnare all within its reach.

Book 2: The Interior

While David Stark is asked to open a law office in Beijing, his lover, detective Liu Hulan, receives an urgent message from an old friend imploring her to investigate the suspicious death of her daughter, who worked for a toy company about to be sold to David’s new client, Tartan Enterprises. As pressures mount and danger increases, Hulan and David uncover universal truths about good and evil, right and wrong–and the sometimes subtle lines that distinguish them.

Book 3: Dragon Bones

When the body of an American archaeologist is found floating in the Yangzi River, Ministry of Public Security agent Liu Hulan and her husband, American attorney David Stark, are dispatched to Site 518 to investigate. As Hulan scrutinizes this death—or is it a murder?—David, on behalf of the National Relics Bureau, tries to discover who has stolen from the site an artifact that may prove to the world China’s claim that it is the oldest uninterrupted civilization on earth.