High Road to China

HIGH ROAD TO CHINA is a 1977 novel by award-winning Australian author Jon Cleary. Set in the 1920s, the plot concerns heiress Eve Tozer, whose father is kidnapped by a Chinese warlord.

In 1920 Eve Tozer, the attractive daughter of an American tycoon with huge trading interests in China, disembarks from her P&O liner at Tilbury and checks in at the Savoy.

It is at the hotel that Eve discovers that her father, Bradley, has been kidnapped by a Chinese warlord. Desperate to save him, Eve hires two pilots to help her fly from England to China. But can she deliver the ransom before it’s too late?

Reviews

PRAISE FOR JON CLEARY:

'When the ruminants and the lucre-chasers are growing lichen on library shelves Jon Cleary will continue to be read'
LOS ANGELES TIMES

'Enough plot twists and conspiracy-making ingredients to satisfy the most demanding aficionado of the genre'
IRISH TIMES

‘The business of a novelist is to tell a story. Jon Cleary has that talent in abundance’ SUNDAY EXPRESS

‘The Malone stories come alive through their setting … Cleary’s writing is seamless and his plots imaginative and mature’ MIAMI HERALD

‘Cleary is a national literary institution… If Australia has a crime writer who deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell, and P.D James, then it is Cleary’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

About the author

Jon Cleary, who died in July 2010, was the author of over fifty novels, including The High Commissioner, which was the first in a popular detective fiction series featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. In 1996 he was awarded the Inaugural Ned Kelly Award for his lifetime contribution to crime fiction in Australia. His last novel, FOUR-CORNERED CIRLCE, was published in 2007.