Inches

The rapid response team arrived too late.

They stormed the bank by the book: used shaped explosives to blow open the doors, entered with guns at the ready. Inside, they found the entire staff lying dead by their desks. There were no signs of forced entry or a struggle. No money had been taken. There were just bodies. Nine ordinary people, killed in cold blood.

A case this extraordinary calls for Harry Feiffer, Hong Bay’s finest detective. The problem is, he has no motive, no suspects and no clues. Has someone finally committed the perfect crime?

Detective Christopher O’Yee is wandering the streets of Hong Kong impersonating a homeless person. His orders from intelligence are to scrawl the word ETERNITY onto sidewalks with a piece of yellow chalk, and to carry a coat hanger at all times. He has no idea why.

PCs Spencer and Auden have been ordered to investigate a series of attempted suicides at the futuristic psychiatric Institute of Yu. Before long they will be battling Mongolian hordes and a flock of warrior seagulls.

The fourteenth book in William Marshall's series is a return to classic form. A crazed medley of action and humour wrapped in a mazy plot that examines serious issues and asks profound questions.

Praise for the Yellowthread Street series:

“Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World

“Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly

“Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune

“Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press

“As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future.” New York Times Book Review

“Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME

“Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews

“Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times