A top Chinese swimmer kills himself on the eve of an international event, shattering his country’s hopes of victory against the Americans. An Olympic weightlifter dies in the arms of his Beijing mistress, a scandal to be hushed up at the highest level. Are these two deaths a tragic coincidence or something more sinister?

Beijing detective Li Yan is troubled to discover that they are not the first of China’s athletes to die. He is so troubled that he brings American pathologist Margaret Campbell out of retirement to perform the autopsies. Could it be that natural causes conceal the most unnatural deaths and threaten the future of international athletics?

Battling to save his career and preparing for marriage, Li Yan knows that the key to the case lies with a champion runner—the only member of the athletics team prepared to talk. But when the runner disappears, time starts running out in the race to catch the killer.

Peter May won the Scottish Young Journalist of the Year Award at age twenty-one and had his first novel published at twenty-six. He went on to become a successful Scottish television dramatist. He lives in France with his wife Janice Halley.