Introducing feisty Asian-American private investigator Maya Mallick in the first of an intriguing new mystery series.
During a morning stroll in Seattle’s Green Lake district, Maya Mallick is horrified to see two young women, shrouded in white, set themselves ablaze in front of the temporary residence of the visiting Chinese foreign minister. She’s even more shocked to recognize one of them: Sylvie Burton, a brilliant Tibetan-American biomedical scientist, who is the adopted sister of Maya’s best friend.
An onlooker informs her that the two women are martyrs, protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Yet Maya has a nagging suspicion that all is not as it seems. One of the policemen on the scene is Detective Justin Stevenson, a former lover who dumped Maya just when she expected a proposal of marriage. Her attempts to speak to him about the case are rebuffed, and she’s upset to hear that he has a girlfriend and a son old enough to have been conceived while he was still dating Maya. Sylvie was working on a vaccine to prevent malaria, and the other woman who died had taken part in a clinical trial to test it.
No one on the scene did anything to stop the women, but one man who was there hires Maya to look into the deaths. With the help of her assistant, she digs up more information on the drug trial and finds out from a prickly Veen that Sylvie had been dating Ivan Dunn, a Russian whose reputation, especially with women, is unsavory. Chasing down clues leads her into trouble, but she refuses to give up.
As Maya gets closer to the shocking truth, she finds her own life on the line.
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