Nothing real could possibly be so terrifying.

The victims were old, rich and powerful. Men who had experienced everything life has to offer. Yet whatever they saw killed them with fear alone. Stopped their hearts dead. Made them tear their eyeballs out of their sockets.

In the final few weeks before the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, detective Harry Feiffer faces a battle with evil incarnate: a demonic witch doctor who has been sowing discord and reaping lives across Asia for more than a century. A monster which might even have killed his father. Or so he is starting to believe.

Detective Christopher O’Yee is packing up Yellowthread police station when a sleepwalking man enters his office, hands him a coded message, and plants an axe in his desk. The unexpected visitor has sharpened teeth, and he‘s bringing some friends.

Far below their feet, in the sewers beneath the station, PCs Spencer and Auden uncover a long forgotten menace - the mother of all unexploded bombs. Twenty foot of blue steel filled with anti-tamper devices and high explosives. For Spencer, this is a dream come true.

The penultimate book in William Marshall's series is one of his best. A crazed meditation on the loss of empire, childhood and sanity, told in his inimitable madcap style.

Praise for the Yellowthread Street series:

“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