Former chief inspector Chen faces a tricky serial murderer case at the height of the Covid pandemic - and risks everything he has to expose the deadly effects of the Chinese Communist Party's so-called zero Covid policy to the world.

Over two million copies of the Inspector Chen series sold worldwide.

The Covid crisis is at its height in China. Ex-chief inspector Chen Cao is horrified by the way the Chinese Communist Party are using the pandemic as an excuse to put the Chinese people under blanket surveillance and by the soaring number of deaths caused not by Covid, but by the CCP's inhuman 'zero Covid' policy.

Chen is debating whether to translate the 'Wuhan File' - a diary of life during the Wuhan disaster smuggled to him by a close friend - and expose the CCP's secrets to the world when to his surprise he is summoned by a high-level party cadre to help investigate a series of murders near a local Shanghai hospital.

Under pressure from the Party to reach a quick conclusion and help maintain political stability, Chen investigates, aware that he too has been placed under omnipresent, omnipotent surveillance. And as he works, determined to uncover the truth, no matter what, he risks everything by deciding to translate the Wuhan Files. For one thing is true in China: you must be absolutely loyal to the Party. Otherwise, you are considered absolutely disloyal, and the consequences are dark indeed . . .

Xiaolong, Qiu

Anthony Award winning author Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai and moved to Washington University in St Louis, US, to complete a PhD degree in comparative literature. After the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 he stayed on in St Louis where he still lives with his wife. Qiu's sold over two million copies of his Inspector Chen mysteries worldwide and been published in twenty languages. On top of his fiction, he is a prize-winning writer of poetry.

All the titles in the Inspector Chen series, including Hold Your Breath, China, have been dramatized in BBC Radio 4 productions.

www.qiuxiaolong.com