When he is ordered to find another prisoner accountable for a series of suspicious deaths aboard a British convict ship, Duncan McCallum follows a series of clues that lead him into the heart of the French and Indian War.

Leading an expedition to return a long-lost Tibetan idol to a remote valley, former Beijing police inspector Shan finds the journey threatened by the murder of the monk guiding them and the Chinese army.

"Shan Tao Yun, now the reluctant constable of a remote Tibetan town, has learned to expect the impossible at the roof of the world, but nothing has prepared him for his discovery when he investigates a report that a nun has been savagely assaulted by ghosts. In an ancient tomb by the old nun lies a gilded saint buried centuries earlier, flanked by the remains of a Chinese soldier killed fifty years before and an American man murdered only hours earlier....

"When Shan Tao Yun and his old friend Lokesh are abruptly dragged away by Public Security, he is convinced that their secret, often illegal, support of struggling Tibetans has brought their final ruin. But his fear turns to confusion as he discovers he has been chosen to fill a vacancy on a special international commission investigating Tibetan suicides. Soon he finds that his predecessor was murdered, and when a monk sets himself on fire in front...

Shan Tao Yun is an exiled Chinese national, a former Beijing Investigator, on parole from the Tibetan gulag to which he had been consigned as punishment. Leading a mule bearing a corpse at the request of a local wisewoman, he comes upon a traffic accident involving a government bus transporting illegal monks to prison. Two women in an approaching vehicle are shot, and one dies in his arms. Shan must find the killer, for his reward will be the life...

"In an earlier time, Shan Tao Yun was an Inspector stationed in Beijing. But he lost his position, his family and his freedom when he ran afoul of a powerful figure high in the Chinese government. Released unofficially from the work camp to which he'd been sentenced, Shan has been living in remote mountains of Tibet with a group of outlawed Buddhist monks. Without status, official identity, or the freedom to return to his former home in Beijing, Shan...

"When a ship arriving from London explodes in Boston Harbor, both the peace of the colonial city and Duncan McCallum's life are shattered ... Duncan discovers that the ship was deliberately sabotaged, apparently to cover the theft by French agents provocateurs of a secret document being carried to the Sons of Liberty ... Fearing that the intrigues of [John] Hancock and the Sons might set the colonies ablaze, Duncan relentlessly pursues the truth,...