Gelignite

📖 The Scoop

In the seamy Hong Bay district of Hong Kong, crimes of every shape and size were commonplace. But not letter bombs. Not till Mr Leung and Mr Ramaswamy were successively spread bloodily over the office walls.

When Detective Inspector Spencer narrowly escaped becoming victim number 3, the Yellowthread Street police were grimly determined to track down the culprit – before the Special Branch got to him. But unless they could find the link between the neatly timed warning letters, the ghosts in the Chinese graveyard and the strange mission of Mr Conway Kan the millionaire, the killer would go free . . .

Gelignite is another tense and exciting drama from the pen of a master.

Full of real police procedure, suspense and fine irony, but with whole extra dimensions of the surreal and the poignant, William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels have no real compare. For those open to their charms, this series is a hidden masterpiece of crime fiction.

“Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World

“Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly

“Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune

“Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press

“As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future.” New York Times Book Review

“Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME

“Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews

“Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times

Genre: Fiction / Thrillers / Crime (fancy, right?)