HANGMAN'S POINT is set in Hong Kong in 1857, one of the most exciting periods in the former British colony's often dramatic history. Its main character, Andrew Adams, is a ne'er-do-well American ex-seaman who manages a tavern called the Bee Hive in the raucous Chinese section of the colony. He lives above a Chinese medicine shop with his American barmaid girlfriend. On the side, he is involved with various Chinese underground secret societies (Triads) and activities such as clandestine gambling and the smuggling of weapons into China.

Adam's New Year prank in the harbor inadvertently results in the burning of an imperial Chinese warjunk which had only recently been captured by a British Admiral. To avoid a long prison term, Adams agrees to aid the Hong Kong police by entering southern China in search of Chinese pirates who attacked a mail steamer and beheaded eleven foreigners. Adams offers the police two advantages: his fluency in various Chinese dialects and his friendship with local rebel groups inside China to whom he supplies arms and ammunition. Unknown to Adams, nothing is as it seems and he is being set up by an old enemy to be killed.

Adams becomes involved with the beautiful and cunning wife of a leading British tea trader. When her husband disappears and a trail of blood is found on the floor of his office-boat, Adams is framed by her for the murder and finds himself at the center of one of the most sensational murder trials the rough-and-tumble colony has yet seen. When an anti-American British jury finds him guilty, in order to escape a hanging, Adams engineers a prison escape. As Hong Kong police comb the colony to find him, he disguises himself in the one occupation they will never suspect - as a Chinese collector of "nightsoil," i.e., human waste.

As this main event progresses to its dramatic conclusion at HANGMAN'S POINT, in the background, several interrelated subplots unfold: the Chinese coolie slave trade, a bread poisoning attempt on Hong Kong's entire foreign community and a pirate attack on Hong Kong. The novel depicts the brutality of prison life of the period including the use of the detested tread wheel as well as the horrible treatment of Chinese coolies aboard slave ships sailing from Southern China to South America.

Many of the events in the novel are based on historical incidents. For example, the arsenic poisoning of the foreign community by Chinese bakers is the only recorded mass poisoning of a community in world history. The period's language, dress, customs and objects have been thoroughly researched and fused into the writing-- from crinolines and top hats to punkahs and pidgin English to opium dens and clipper ships.

HANGMAN'S POINT will transport the reader into an exciting and turbulent Hong Kong caught between the dragon and the lion: Imperial China and Victorian England.