Books in The Red Princess Mysteries series

In a magnificent land where myth mixes treacherously with truth, one woman is in charge of telling them apart. Liu Hulan is the Inspector in China’s Ministry of Public Security whose tough style rousts wrongdoers and rubs her superiors the wrong way. Now her latest case finds her trapped between her country’s distant past and her own recent history. The case starts at a rally for a controversial cult that ends suddenly in bloodshed, and leads to the apparent murder of an American archaeologist, which officials want to keep quiet. And haunting Hulan’s investigation is the possible theft of ancient dragon bones that might alter the history of civilization itself. Getting to the bottom of ever-spiraling events, Hulan unearths more scandals, confronts more murderers, and revives tragic memories that shake her tormented marriage to its core. In the end, she solves a mystery as big, unruly, and complex as China itself.Praise for Dragon Bones“Stays with you long after the conventional thriller is forgotten.”—The Washington Post Book World“Lisa See is one of the classier practitioners of . . . the international thriller. . . . She draws her characters . . . with convincing depth, and offers up documentary social detail that reeks of freshly raked muck. See’s China is as vivid as Upton Sinclair’s Chicago.”—The New York Times Book Review

When the body of an American archaeologist is found floating in the Yangzi River, Ministry of Public Security agent Liu Hulan and her husband, American attorney David Stark, are sent to investigate. As Hulan scrutinizes this death, David tries to discover who has stolen an artifact from the site. This artifact is not only an object of great monetary value but one that is emblematic of the very soul of China. Everyone - from the Chinese government, to a religious cult, to an unscrupulous art collector - wants this relic, and some, it seems, may be willing to kill to get it. Dragon Bones combines ancient myth with contemporary anxieties concerning religious fanaticism and terrorism to tell a story of love, betrayal, history, ecology, greed - and gory murder.