Book nine of the Rowland Sinclair mysteries sees Rowland and his Scooby gang of crime fighting artist friends travelling to Shanghai. When the series began almost ten years years ago with ‘A Few Right Thinking Men’ the reader was transported back to Australia at the turn of the 1930’s. Rowland Sinclair is the playboy youngest son of a grazier with little more care in the world than painting and hanging out with his rebellious friends (think artists and communists). Skip forward over the years and eight books and we are in 1935 and Rowland is a world weary but still dapper playboy who has had to solve numerous crimes to hold back the forces of fascism from invading Australia’s shores.

When a young woman is murdered in Rowland's Shanghai penthouse he is the prime suspect. It becomes a race against time to clear Rowland’s good name before he is thrown into a Shanghai prison, but Rowland is surrounded by an eclectic selection of friends and foes with no way of knowing who to trust.