The Story

The classic chase novel – epitomized by The Wild Bunch, The Searchers and True Grit – was reworked by Frederick Forsyth in The Day of the Jackal, James Dickey in Deliverance and Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men. The Turquoise Dragon follows in that tradition.

The villain of the piece is wealthy Chinese businessman Tommie Chan. Chan is in pursuit of ten letters written by his late mother, a hero of the Communist Party – the contents of these letters, if revealed, will imperil Chan's fortune and destroy his revered mother's name. Chasing him is the hero: Li Jiang, top agent in China's state security agency, whose pursuit of Chan for financial crimes is about to take on new urgency.

Chan and his right-hand man, a shadowy international crime lord named Major Torrance, leave a trail of bodies behind them as they hunt the letters, and Li tracks both of them through Zurich and on to Paris, where he encounters two American expatriates: Shaun O'Connor and Delphine Moreau. When the letters fall into Moreau's hands, both she and O'Connor find themselves the targets of Chan's increasingly violent search – and Li is drawn deeper when he discovers that Moreau is the daughter of a man who spared his life during the Vietnam War. Li dedicates himself to keeping Moreau alive, even if it means his death.

This is the core of Turquoise Dragon's story. Deepening it – and helping to make it distinctive among other offerings in the genre – are:

The voices of the dead

Li Jiang, a Buddhist and a believer in the flow of information from beyond the grave, seeks guidance from the departed as he pursues Chan from country to country. Li's visits to the cemeteries of Kopi Sua in Singapore and Fluntern in Zurich occur "off-camera" – but in Paris, the reader joins Li as he walks the paths of Pere Lachaise and confronts Major Torrance as the sun sets on the ancient cemetery of Montmartre. The language of these chapters is nuanced and evocative...and in every case, the voices of the dead are heard.

Exploring unknown Paris

Turquoise Dragon is a novel in which the Louvre is never visited, the Eiffel Tower is never climbed and Notre Dame is never entered. Rather, the reader is taken on a tour of Paris that is far off the tourist track: through the alleyways of the Marais, into the fabulous wealth of the 8th Arrondissement and the African immigrant neighborhoods of the 18th, and finally to an island in the Seine, the Ile aux Cygnes, where the story's endgame begins.

Showdown on the Seine

The novel's climax is kinetic and highly visual: Li and O'Connor on one side, Chan and several members of a Chinese triad on the other, Moreau held hostage – and all of them on board a working cargo ship plying the Seine. Chan has proposed a deal to Li: he will return Moreau unharmed if he is given control of his mother's letters. The armed Li suspects a trap – and he's right: soon guns are pulled, blood is shed, and the out-of-control ship races downriver on a collision course with one of the most famous bridges in Paris.