A teenager returns home from school to find a gruesome scene: the apartment he shares with his mother, Shao Mei, in Boston's Chinatown has been ransacked and she is dead. There is a bottle of Moutai-the most exotic and expensive Chinese liquor-left at the scene and traces of rat poison in one of the two shot glasses on the kitchen counter. This was evidently a homicide, but who could possibly be the killer? Ann Lee and Fang Chen, close friends of the victim, team up with the Boston police to solve this mystifying crime: why would anyone want to murder a harmless middle-aged woman, one who...

In Beacon Hill, one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Boston, a wealthy widow dies in her sleep, while in Cambridge, where academia meets high tech, a dog is slaughtered. One death has seemingly no bearing on the other until the death in a remote Chinese village is announced. Answering the call from a friend, amateur detectives Ann Lee and Fang Chen rush to the ancient village, where the branches of a family tree stretch from China to New Zealand, Australia, and the US, and where-to Ann's great chagrin-Fang Chen becomes obsessed with a girl being pursued by a ruthless killer who will...

The third in the series of The Back Bay Investigation, Death Comes to Lake Como takes place a few years after the events of Mystery of Moutai and The Fatal Sin of Love. It opens with Fang Chen and his new bride corresponding with their friend, Ann Lee, while on vacation in Italy. Things quickly turn sinister when a nurse for a wealthy American tourist and a retired cook are murdered. Ripples of strife left over from the Cultural Revolution in China once again pull Ann and Fang Chen into a complicated murder case. The answers are not easily found by the amateur detectives and take them through...

The first time Jamie meets Jim, she is a graduate student, and he is a dashing young man embarking on a successful career in pharmaceutical research. They cultivate a mutual affection for each other while pursuing different goals in life. When Jamie meets Jim again years later, she has broken up with her long-time boyfriend, and he is having marital problems. A one-night stand in a remote hotel turns their friendship into a two-decade long love affair. When their liaison becomes too difficult to sustain, it brings a crisis to its head. The accidental death of Jim's wife clears the way for the...