Read by Peter Forbes

The Chinese police have once more been forced to enlist the services of American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell, this time to investigate a series of four horrific ritual executions in Beijing. Detective Li Yan is determined to discover just how one of the victims in particular, an American diplomat, became caught up in the slaying. And he is arguably even more determined to have nothing to do with Campbell, whom he finds simultaneously too foreign and too . . . familiar. The personal polarity that once attracted Yan and Campbell again strengthens their professional partnership. Yet the closer they draw to the truth, the greater the danger posed by a killer prepared to do anything to conceal it. Peter May was born and raised in Scotland. He was an award-winning journalist at the age of twenty-one and a published novelist at twenty-six. When his first book was adapted as a major drama series for the BBC, he quit journalism and, during the high-octane fifteen years that followed, became one of Scotland's most successful television dramatists. He created three prime-time drama series, presided over two of the highest-rated serials in his homeland as script editor and producer, and worked on more than 1,000 episodes of ratings-topping drama before deciding to leave teleivision to retun to his first love, writing novels. He has won several literature awards in France; received the USA's Barry Award for The Blackhouse, the first in his internationally bestselling Lewis Trilogy; and in 2014 was awarded the ITV Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year award for Entry Island. Peter now lives in southwest France with his wife, writer Janice Hally. Praise for Peter May: "He is a terrific writer doing something different."-Mark Billingham "From the first page I knew I was in safe hands. I knew I could trust this writer."-Sophie Hannah "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth."-Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

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