HIS name is Liu Chiang-hsin: "a mind as sharp as a sword." But "Chinaman" is the name his friends and contacts use. Chinaman grew up in Beijing during the Mao era and was traumatized by seeing Red Guards beat his scholar-father and drag him off; never to return. Three decades later, the one woman who managed to penetrate his emotional defenses has been found murdered in the New York Palace Hotel. And Chinaman won't rest until he finds the killer.

Chinaman is a 35-year-old private detective living in New York City's East Village. He is unlucky enough to have, as an ex-father-in-law, Manhattan's Chief of Detectives. Worse yet, Chinaman finds himself in the position of trying to enlist his ex-wife's help in solving the murder of the woman she found in bed with him -- just before their marriage ended.

The search for the killer takes him to Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, Brooklyn Heights and, finally, Red Hook. Along the way, he enlists the aid of an American friend in an intelligence agency, a street junkie, an ex-girlfriend, an ex-wife, and a cop at One Police Plaza.

By using his computer, his fists, his wits, his contacts and his knowledge of the streets, Chinaman tracks down the murderers. The denouement takes place in Brooklyn's sinister and bleak Red Hook area at night among the loading cranes, transit sheds, canine-guarded warehouses and chain-linked fences topped with barbed wire. And, if Chinaman can prevent the memories of his Beijing boyhood from overwhelming him, he might just have a Chinaman's chance of coming out alive.

"I was riveted by Dean Barrett's portrayal of the tensions, and excitement, of the East-West interchange. Beautiful writing, and edge-of-the-seat suspense kept me anxious to the finish."
-- Sujata Massey

"In Chinaman, Dean Barrett has created a private eye as laconic and street-wise as anything from the pen of Raymond Chandler....With Murder in China Red, Barrett has spun a well-crafted murder mystery filled with characters that leap off the page."
-- Stephen Leather