The Chinese Sailor

A Chinese naval officer from a cruise ship goes missing while it visits the Welsh port of Holyhead… and a missing person investigation turns up nothing.
An international police operation to break an art smuggling ring loses track of three Russian paintings worth $2 million ... they disappear from the same ship, on the same cruise.

Four months later Jian Li Yeung, the younger sister of the missing sailor, transfers suddenly from university in Hong Kong to Bangor University, not that far from the point where her brother disappeared.

The Metropolitan Police Art Crime Unit, the ACU, wants to know why she is in the UK. Constable Catrin Sayer is a uniformed police officer working for the ‘Met’ and has applied to the ACU to take her out of drug squad work in Brixton. Coincidence and her Welsh background lead her to agree to go undercover to find out more.

This is the first Catrin Sayer full-length novel in a planned series of art-related mysteries. Sayer is twenty-four at the time; keen, ambitious, trying to balance her work as a police officer with her interests as an artist, a ceramic decorator. From her short-term undercover role with the Art Crime Unit to her assignment to a team trying to discover the fate of both the paintings and the missing sailor, she finds herself adjusting to new challenges, new relationships and the meaning of becoming a ‘detective constable’ at New Scotland Yard.

Please read also The Scottish Colourist, the second Catrin Sayer novel, (now available) and watch out for the next novel in the series, currently titled The Falmouth Model.