Bøger af Steven M Roth

A SECRET WORTH KILLING FOR . . . . When Socrates Cheng is hired by a Civil War museum to investigate a burglary and to recover stolen documents, he comes face-to-face with the most perilous and controversial investigation of his career as he learns that the documents contain an explosive and deadly secret: that revered Confederate General Robert E. Lee was born a black slave who passed for white. Pressed hard by the museum to recover the documents before their incendiary content becomes public, and suspected by homicide cops of having committed murder in the course of his investigation, Socrates races to protect the museum's most closely guarded secret and to establish his own innocence. The Counterfeit Twin marries the suspense of an intricate murder mystery with glimpses into Civil War history, southern plantation slave life, and the strange behavior of modern-day Civil War reenactors.

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.

SHANGHAI, 1935. The Most Alluring and Most Dangerous City in the WorldSomeone is murdering flower-seller girls in Shanghai's Flowery Kingdom. And it is police Inspector-Detective Sun-jin's job -- his obsession, in fact -- to track down the killer and to arrest him, all at great peril to himself and to the people he loves.Sun-jin, as he investigates the murders and deals with his complicated personal life, takes us though the contrasting worlds of East and West in Shanghai -- down the city's dark alleys and streets, through its gritty, crime-infested, triad-controlled underworld, but also into the plush private clubs of its British expatriates and bureaucrats, into the world of popular nightclubs, jazz bands, taxi dancers, and gambling dens, where money and greed thrive, human life means little, and cultures and politics often collide.Through Sun-jin's eyes, as he investigates the murders, we see the best and the worst of this pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, highly cultured, enticing, and most decadent city in the world, in 1935.

What if the president of the United States authorized a secret biological weapon attack against an American city as part of a homeland security experiment intended to provide the government with real-time information showing how people would react after an actual terrorist's attack? And what if you and your family happened to be vacationing in the target city when that government experiment occurred?That's the situation that ex-Navy SEAL Trace Austin and his family find themselves in when they go on vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and become trapped behind barbed wire, subject to quarantine and martial law.

Four years have passed since the events in MANDARIN YELLOW when Socrates' Chinese heritage pulled him into the mysteries of his oriental roots. Socrates now is a wiser and more cynical investigator. In the time that has passed since MANDARIN YELLOW, Socrates' father has died and his mother has returned to her Greek origins, moving into a condominium populated by elderly Greek immigrants, including one woman who is reputed to be the direct descendant of the ancient Oracle at Delphi. And that is where Socrates' problems begin as Socrates, skeptical at first of the old woman's powers, soon learns the hard way that her dire prophecies sometimes have a disquieting and deadly way of coming true.