Godless

The pavilion had been built right into the water, a sala of filigree wood on a pillared platform of semi precious stone.' She was already there early the next morning when Michael arrived from Ajodhya in a tuk-tuk. She was gazing out across the water, at the finger of mist clinging to the lake. She did not look up. He wondered if she had heard him arrive. Then she blew a bubble of gum and it spattered across his nose. He laughed and she turned around. 'You teach me this trick.’ 'Ly May,' he said.' 

1978. Ly May survives the fall of Saigon, living on the street and in communist camps; she survives pirates and the sinking of her flimsy rate to escape to a new life in Thailand. a flimsy raft. She is introduced to life as a bar girl in Bangkok. But Ly May is a survivor and what gets her through is the memory the pilot who befriended her in the Long Tieng air base and tried to save her life. Finally she ends up on the arm of Douglas Ho, one of the major players in the international heroin trade and number two in a Hong Kong triad. And that's when she meets her saviour again; but now he is with an American drug enforcement agency. 

The stakes are excruciatingly high; the Chinese are expanding onto the US western seaboard and the potential profits are breathtaking. Douglas Ho will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Does Ly May stay with the rich life she has been so lucky to find or stay true to the man who helped her as a child and risk everything, her millionaire life and even her life? From the heroin factories of the Golden Triangle to the drug banks of California and Bangkok, from bloody gun battles in San Francisco's Chinatown to the palaces of the super rich in Hong Kong, this is a rollercoaster journey that will leave you breathless to the last page.

'Falconer's grasp of period and places is almost flawless ... He's my kind of writer.' - Peter Corris, The Australian

'Some men don't fall in love, they get lost. I was lost from the moment I saw Anastasia Romanov in the taxi club that first night ...'

When Michael Sheridan jumped into the Whangpoa River to save a woman he had met in one of Shanghai's taxi clubs, his life changed irrevocably. A Russian refugee, Anastasia Romanov bears an uncanny resemblance to the princess of the same name, who was rumoured to have survived the brutal murder of her family at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries.

The fate of the last Czar's youngest daughter has become one of the most talked about mysteries of the time, but Michael's Anastasia is suffering from traumatic amnesia and remembers nothing of her life before Shanghai. So who is she?

Unraveling the mystery of Anastasia's identity and past takes them both from the streets of Shanghai to the decadence of pre-war Berlin, from the London of flappers and Charlestons, behind the grim curtain of Bolshevik Russia and finally to New York just before the Wall Street crash.

'Falconer weaves a pacy story of obsession, love, greed and corruption ... Really well done.' - Sydney Morning Herald