An Inspector Loki Novel: Book 1
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Horace Yang, a downtrodden office worker haunted by failure, betrayal, and brutal imprisonment during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has finally found a way to settle the score. Obsessed with revenge, he presses on to a confrontation that can only end in death.
​In Hong Kong’s teeming Yau Ma Tei district, a body is found in a gangster’s limousine. The murder case takes Inspector Lok and his team deep into the heart of the city’s criminal life. Eventually Lok’s investigation uncovers an evil spawned in the turmoil of 1960s China, where a vicious regime exploited fear and terrorized the masses.
Rented Grave is a crime story about Hong Kong, a modern city entangled in China’s past. Some can’t forget that past, for their wounds still bleed, and their voices still cry out for revenge.
A man seeking revenge gets more than he bargained for in Rented Grave.
Set in Hong Kong, the book by Charles Philipp Martin features a man named Horace Yang who murders the wrong man and ends up with a child hostage rather than killing the intended gangster.
Inspector Lok and his team delve deep into the case, which soon morphs into a decades-old score to be settled. While the gangster wants his grandson returned, he doesn’t want the police scrutiny to uncover things better left buried.
It’s an interesting police procedural highlighting how different countries handle investigations, particularly one with ties to 1960s China.
Rented Grave marks the third installment in the Inspector Lok series, serving up a solid dose of thrills and corruption.
Charles Philipp Martin grew up in New York City’s Greenwich Village. His father was an opera conductor and both his parents well-known opera translators and librettists who never uttered the word “parenting” but knew enough to steep their family in music and literature. After attending Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music, Martin took off for a six-year paid vacation in the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.
While in Hong Kong he hung up his bow and turned to writing, spending four years as a Sunday Magazine columnist for the South China Morning Post, and writing for magazines all over Southeast Asia. His weekly jazz radio show 3 O’Clock Jump was heard every Saturday on Hong Kong’s Radio 3 for some two decades.
Neon Panic, a suspense novel which introduced Hong Kong policeman Inspector Herman Lok, was published in 2011. His most recent novel is Rented Grave, the first in a new series featuring Inspector Herman Lok. Martin now lives in Seattle with his wife Catherine.
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Thanks for sharing. I will be reading this one myself.