Here the detectives of Scotland Yard know of many strange things and see the results of the workings of such evil minds as Dr. Fu Manchu. The author is one of the few men who has penetrated the secrets of the Limehouse underworld sufficiently to enable him to write about them authentically and interestingly. Here are sudden deaths in peculiar ways, mysterious disappearances and all sorts of crimes --- where human life is valued none too highly.

    

    There’s Chan Sam, who left an "at home" wife in China to earn a living in "Gold Mountain"—North America. There’s May-ying, the wilful, seventeen-year-old concubine he bought, sight unseen, who labored in tea houses of west coast Chinatowns to support the family he would have in Canada, and the one he had in China. It was the concubine’s third daughter, the author’s mother, who unlocked the past for her daughter, whose curiosity about some old photographs ultimately reunited a family divided for most of the last century.

    Now that they're entering adulthood and her long-delayed photography career is taking off, she can almost taste the freedom. Shaken by self-doubt, Dr. Mick Larsen turns his back on his big-city psychiatric practice and settles for the small-town quiet of Redbud Mill, where he can hide his past successes and failures. To Caroline, he shows only a man who wants to put down roots and start a family--good reasons for her to stay away. Then someone starts vandalizing local landmarks she has photographed. Now Caroline must convince a man with little faith in his own abilities that he can help her find the disturbed mind in their midst. But even as she teaches him to trust himself, she must fight the temptation to trust him with her future and her heart.

    One of his eyes is palest grey. The other is a Zeiss eyecam with enough data locked in it to blow open a very messy murder trial. Unfortunately for Alex, media giant CySat GmB reckon the evidence belongs to them. And they intend to take it. so does the Order of Antioch, a shadowy organization run by an 800-year-old Sicilian psychopath.Bad news for prosecutor Clare Fabio, who's been set up but doesn't know it. Just as she doesn't yet know her only chance of getting out of Paris alive is to cut a deal with a ruthless, criminally inclined computer.While on the other side of the world, wired into the Cy, sits Johnnie T, leader of the neoAddix, Japan's slickest street gang - who just may be able to do something to help them.Or maybe not...NEOADDIX, drawing on today's and tomorrow's developments in genetics, nanotechnology and computer hacking, is a dark, violent technoshocker that splices the thriller with Japanese traditions of manga to create cutting-edge cyber noir.

    Quarrels are made in an apartment flat, baijiu is served in a state of surveillance, chow mein alternates with autonomous cars, and a girl has to choose between romance and money. It’s poignant how Beijing is divided into three segments that decides life for its 80 million citizens, and separates them — even physically — into the working, professional, and ruling class, in which ones birth determines ones future. This alone is an eerie parallel to today, where people are increasingly divided, and inhabiting different worlds within the same space — a parallel in which education, fresh air and nutritious food — and even sunlight — become luxuries, just like designer clothing and jewellery. Hao Jingfang’s writing, translated by Ken Liu, is poetic and clean, and carries a political message. It’s science-fictional, but it is the timelessness that gives this story its elegance.