MASTER OF RAIN(上海血案)

Shanghai, 1926. A city glistening with decadence and rife with corruption--a humid, bustling society at the cultural crossroads of British civil servants, American gun runners, Russian princesses, and Chinese gangsters.
For Richard Field, a young Englishman new to the international police force, Shanghai represents a brave new world away from the past he is trying to escape. But his naiveté is quickly dashed when he is called to the scene of a brutal crime, in which a young Russian woman, Lena Orlov, has been found sadistically murdered in her bed. Field's idealistic instincts push him to investigate the case, but his attempts are met with apathy--then menace--from his colleagues. He begins to recognize that some cases in Shanghai are intended to remain unsolved, and, in a matter of days, he glimpses the murky depths that lurk beneath a luminous city.
Field's drive to find the murderer leads him to Lena's neighbor, Natasha Medvedev. A stunning beauty who fled her charmed life in tsarist Russia, Natasha escaped the Revolution but landed, like many of her counterparts, in a treacherous life in Shanghai. Natasha travels in an elite circle--one that orbits, Field knows, around the city’s most feared drug lord, Lu Huang. As his attraction to the beguiling Natasha grows, he is faced with a piercing question: can he trust someone whose only goal is self-preservation? And is it wise to fall in love with a woman who may herself be the next victim?
Trusting only his Chicago-hardened American partner, Caprisi, Field follows leads that run into the heart of a lawlessly corrupt city, slowly uncovering a web of deception that will leave him reeling.
In The Master of Rain, Tom Bradby weaves a taut, atmospheric crime novel that doles out surprising turns until the last suspenseful page.

TOM BRADBY is a foreign correspondent for the British television network ITN. He has spent the last eight years covering British and American politics, as well as conflicts in China, Ireland, Kosovo, and Indonesia. While living in Hong Kong and writing this novel, Bradby researched historical records and archives of 1920s Shanghai. He now lives in London with his wife and three children.