Asian Crime

Some of the cruelest deeds of Japan's war in Asia did not occur on the battlefield, but in quiet, antiseptic medical wards in obscure parts of China. Far from front lines and prying eyes, Japanese doctors and their assistants subjected human guinea pigs to gruesome medical experiments in the name of science and Japan's wartime chemical and biological warfare research. Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities.

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

'In a way, the hate felt good. You were righteous, godlike, the dispenser of justice...' Super-smart sleuth Isaiah Quintabe - IQ to his friends - has built a mostly respectable life for himself, helping out friends and neighbours when he can and taking the occasional case to make ends meet. But there is one mystery that still haunts him almost 10 years later - did his brother really die in a hit-and-run, or was there more to the story behind his death?

Five thousand years ago, there came to earth a magical being called Krishna, who brought about innumerable miracles for the good of mankind. Humanity despaired of its fate if the Blue God were to die but was reassured that he would return in a fresh avatar when needed in the eventual Dark Age - the Kaliyug. In modern times a poor little rich boy grows up believing that he is that final avatar. Only, he is a serial killer.

Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese in small-town Japan with a set of talents limited to playing guitar and picking fights. With rock stardom off the table, he turns toward the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer merit, loyalty, and brute force―the yakuza. Saigo, nicknamed “The Tsunami”, quickly realizes that even within the organization, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.

East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, OAPs are getting hoodwinked, children are missing. But word has spread: if you've got a case the police can't or won't touch, Isaiah Quintabe will help you out. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford. But now he needs a client who can pay.

In modern-day Tokyo, Robin Swann's life has sputtered to a stop. She's stuck in a dead-end job testing antiquities for an auction house, but her true love is poetry, not pottery. Her stalled dissertation sits on her laptop, unopened in months, and she has no one to confide in but her goldfish. On the other side of town, Nori Okuda sells rice bowls and tea cups to Tokyo restaurants, as her family has done for generations. But with her grandmother in the hospital, the family business is foundering. Nori knows if her luck doesn't change soon, she'll lose what little she has left.

Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in the Himalayan foothills of China - dubbed the true Shangri-La - and heads south into the jungles of Burma. But after the mysterious death of their tour leader, the carefully laid plans fall apart, and disharmony breaks out among the pleasure-seekers.

When Amy Blahn died on a London rooftop, Layla Mahoney was there. Layla was holding her. But all she can say when she’s arrested is that ‘It was Michael. Find Michael and you’ll find out everything you need to know'. The problem is, the police can’t find him—they aren’t even sure he exists. Layla knows she only has forty-eight hours to convince the police that bringing in the man she knows only as ‘Michael’ will clear her name and reveal a dangerous game affecting not just Amy and Layla, but her husband Russell and countless others.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor.

Life in modern Tokyo is a blast for Rei Shimura, a young Japanese-American woman who enjoys busy days as an antiques dealer and steamy nights with a devoted new boyfriend. But things come to a standstill when Rei overpays for a rare old chest of drawers for a wealthy client, the owner of a famous Zen temple in Kamakura. The exquisite tansu turns out to be a fake: the worst deal Rei has ever made. When the temple family turns on Rei - and the con man who sold the tansu is murdered - she realizes she's opened a Pandora's box of deception and death.

In her 30 years as Temple Hill's most renowned matchmaker, Sarla thought she'd seen it all. Blissful unions, marriages of convenience, Mr. and Mrs. Good Enough. Not to mention the bitter unfortunates who never made it down the aisle. She's received as many threats as thank-yous along the way. Surely no one would actually harm her. A series of threatening notes, sent in blood-red envelopes, suggest otherwise. Then the body of a woman is found at Sarla's office, sprawled on her stomach next to a heavy bronze statue of the Nataraja — the god of dance. Who was the intended victim?

Isaiah Quintabe, the genius PI who combines book smarts, street smarts and enough blistering action to melt the pavement of East Long Beach, is back with a new adventure. Fresh off the beating he took at the hands of a gang of ex-Abu Ghraib thugs working as paramilitary contractors, IQ is determined to build a life for himself with his new girlfriend, Grace. For once, he wants to be normal - a normal guy, with a normal PI business, doing the best he can. But this is IQ, and trouble is never far behind him....

Just as WASPs, Irish-Catholics, and Our Crowd Jews once made the ascent from immigrants to powerbrokers, it is now the Indian-American's turn. Citigroup, PepsiCo and Mastercard are just a handful of the Fortune 500 companies led by a group known as the "Twice Blessed". Yet little is known about how these Indian émigrés (and children of émigrés) rose through the ranks. Until now....

Will Chen, a Chinese American art history student at Harvard, has spent most of his life learning about the West—its art, its culture, all that it has taken and called its own. He believes art belongs with its creators, so when a Chinese corporation offers him a (highly illegal) chance to reclaim five priceless sculptures, it's surprisingly easy to say yes.

The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for…restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder. The ‘natural deaths’ he plans have always gone well: a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. And it’s not as though he knows these people. Until his next ‘customer’ turns out to be someone he not only knows but cares about, and for the first time, he begins to question the role he plays in the vast, anonymous Company.

There is nothing Rosie "Aunty" Lee, amateur sleuth and proprietor of Singapore's best-loved restaurant, loves more than solving other people's problems. So when Beth Kwuan, an ambitious businesswoman, tells Aunty Lee her maid has disappeared, Aunty Lee is happy to let her own maid, Nina, help. Only as the weeks go by, little clues make Aunty Lee worry. And as she digs into what is really going on behind the closed doors of Beth's grand house, she starts to wonder - did Beth's maid just run away, or did she meet a darker fate?

As IQ plugs a mysterious USB into his laptop, he's horrified to see what flashes across the screen: his girlfriend Grace is sweaty and bedraggled - her wrists wrapped with duct tape. Grace has been kidnapped by the likes of Skip Hanson, a brutish hitman with a vendetta against Isaiah. As IQ and Dodson attempt to locate Grace based on scant evidence, (read: a Sonic burger wrapper in one grainy image) they must wend through the stark, unrelenting East California landscape in search of clues.

Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon's henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad. Battered and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge.

Isaiah Quintabe - IQ for short - has never been more successful - or felt more alone. A series of high-profile wins in his hometown of East Long Beach have made him so notorious that he can hardly go to the corner store without being recognised. Dodson, once his sidekick, is now his full-fledged partner, hell-bent on giving IQ's PI business some real legitimacy: a Facebook page, and IQ's promise to stop accepting Christmas sweaters and carpet cleanings in exchange for PI services.