City on Fire
A Novel of Hong Kong
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- 21,99 €
Publisher Description
A police detective in Hong Kong races to solve a vicious murder, while the city around him teeters on the brink of destruction.
Hong Kong is a city ablaze—its streets filled with protesters, its government in crisis, its people torn between rage and fear of what defiance might cost. At the center stands Superintendent Killian Tong, once a rising star in the police, now disgraced and haunted by a tragic accident at a protest. Exiled to a remote post, Killian is called back when a dismembered body is uncovered in a landfill. The gruesome murder could be his path to redemption—if he can withstand mounting pressure from superiors desperate to bury the truth, and the even more dangerous fractures within his own family.
His beloved younger sister Jun refuses to speak to him, devoting herself to the protest movement. Once inseparable, the siblings now face each other across barricades, Jun’s fierce commitment pulling her closer to arrest and ruin.
As Killian follows the murder trail into Hong Kong’s highest corridors of power, he must confront not only the city’s corruption, but the searing question at his heart: When politics ignites a family war, can love survive the flames?
City on Fire is both a taut thriller and a deeply human story of loyalty, betrayal, and the search for redemption in a city under siege.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A white Hong Kong police detective is torn between family, faith, and duty as he tackles corruption at the highest levels of government in the satisfying latest from Elegant (A Floating Life). In 2019, disgraced police superintendent Killian Tong is called back from his rural post when a mutilated body is discovered in a Hong Kong landfill. Though Killian believes solving the murder might help get his career back on track, his superiors want the case resolved as quickly and quietly as possible, owing in part to escalating anti-government protests. As Killian investigates, he tries to mend his relationship with his younger sister, Jun, an anti-police activist whose activities have landed her on a government watch list. Eventually, Killian's inquiry implicates major power players in Hong Kong's government, and his superiors insist he bury the truth, forcing him to reckon with the episode that got him exiled in the first place. The David-and-Goliath struggle at the heart of the novel is thrilling to witness, and Elegant fortifies it with a complex portrait of Hong Kong's racial politics and a sobering study of widespread political malfeasance. Striking just the right balance of tension and emotional depth, this bruising thriller delivers the goods.
