Beijing detective Li Yan, now based at the Chinese embassy in Washington, is dispatched to find out how his fellow countrymen died in a sealed refrigeration unit in southern Texas. Then he finds himself face-to-face with American pathologist Margaret Campbell, the woman who walked out of China, and his life, to return to the U.S.

Tasked to work together again to investigate the $100 million trade in illegal Chinese immigrants that led to the tragedy in Texas, they discover that the immigrants were unwitting carriers of a deadly cargo. And still wrestling with the demons of their pasts, Li and Margaret find themselves racing against time to defuse a biological time-bomb that threatens to wipe out not only their future, but that of humankind.

PETER MAY, winner of the Young Journalist of the Year in his native Scotland at age twenty-one and a literary prizewinner, was a prolific television scriptwriter in the UK for nearly twenty years. He now lives in France with his wife.