Self-made billionaire Li Chenqing, China’s wealthiest and most ruthless industrialist, has died. At his funeral, his elder son Tian Wu discovers that decades before, during the Mao regime, Old Li sold his soul—and much more—in a Faustian bargain for power. The son responds by casting aside filial piety to exact a heinous revenge against his late father’s legacy.
Fast-forward a year. Detective Inspector Nigel Hawkins and Special Agent Daniella Benelli, partnered again after The China Contract (the first episode of the Inspector Hawkins series), re-deploy to Asia when a family of U.S. citizens is massacred at a luxury resort in Vietnam’s northwest highlands. By the hand of Fate, the victims are Old Li’s Americanized daughter Jun Ying and her American spouse and children. In the challenge to expose the hand—or hands—of the killers, and chasing a thin trail of clues, Hawkins, Benelli, and a “third musketeer,” the redoubtable Lt. Thanh, cross into China, where they become entangled in the history, secrets, and complex fortunes of the late Mr. Li. In a near-fatal ambush on the streets of Shanghai, our trio are aided by the surprise intrusion of an armed patrol under a Chinese official, a Mr. Wang–whose life Hawkins and Benelli saved in The China Contract. Wang becomes the conduit for pursuit of the killers of Jun Ying and her family. Riding along in the shadows are Benelli and Hawkins’s common truths of heartbreak, obsession, and redemption.