THE SNIPER

Imagine Jason Bourne meets an older and grumpier John McClane, both inadvertent players in a top-secret international arms deal scandal worth billions of dollars. Spiced the story with black humor, Chinese cuisine and secret societies, and you get THE STIR-FRIED SNIPER – a truly original take on the international thriller, Taiwanese style.

Twelve days before retirement, Taipei police detective Wu is given a curious case: a Navy officer's suicide in his hotel room. He is clearly murdered, Wu thinks, but the military wants to close the case as suicide, with no questions asked. And that is only the first of a series of suspicious deaths.

At the same time, a sleeping cell is called to action. Alex is a young Taiwanese sniper, ex-Marine, ex-French Foreign Legion, currently a fried rice chef in Manarola, Italy. Ordered to assassinate a high-level Taiwanese government advisor in Rome, he is soon on the run, hunted by his old brothers-in-arms across Europe.

Who is killing Navy officers in Taiwan? And who ordered the kill in Rome? As Wu races against time to solve the mounting cases before retirement, Alex embarks on a journey back to Taiwan, back to his beginning, where a group of war orphans were raised by a benevolent “grandpa” and trained to serve the nation.

Based on the biggest military corruption case in Taiwan history – the murder of Navy Captain Yin Ching-feng – THE STIR-FRY SNIPER is both a masterclass in thriller writing and a study of the heart of darkness in the time of war and peace. This is also the first in a series of “food meets crime” novels written by leading Chinese-language crime writers, all to be published by Marco Polo and edited by Sean Hsu, Taiwan's leading crime editor and critic.

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