Kindle Edition
Website of Thomas Haftmann, Raimo Jarvi, & Jade Hui
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Grand Mal Press
Pages: 404
Copyright: Sept. 2, 2026
ISBN-13: 9798171048730
Price: $9.62 (eBook)
A seedy academic, who steals valuable books from special collections, attracts the attention of Russian killers.
Tough, linguistically gifted Annie Cheng has just turned 40 and her life and career are going downhill fast. Her husband wants a divorce. Her latest partner wants a transfer, and her bosses at Manhattan headquarters have grown weary of her maverick ways. Even though she’s bringing down the bad guys and solving cases in Brighton Beach (nexus of Russian mafiya), she finds out she’s been posted to Cleveland, Ohio, where she’s been given a real dog of a case—or so she thinks at first. Someone has been stealing priceless books and illuminated manuscript pages from rare book collections in public and university libraries all across the Midwest. Annie’s job is to catch the book thief.
Excerpt
One Fat Thief: Annie Cheng Investigates
Prologue: Forty-thousand feet above the Finger Lakes
The man occupying the window seat finally gave up trying to make conversation with her, which consisted entirely of his bragging about his software ventures in Prescott, Arizona and new house in Lake Tahoe. At last he cranked back his seat and burrowed his head into the mini-pillow the airlines provided, grumbling about the “crappy service” of today’s air travel.
As a schoolgirl strolling along the Wang Pu, she had come across an old man from the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province. He wore a faded Mao jacket and cap and moaned to the indifferent passersby he had been rudely cheated by a young man in the Bund who had sold him a “broken water machine.” He held up a rusted-out spigot as proof. He had seen water pouring out of these everywhere he went, he said, and he wanted to take one of these magic machines back to his village. She wondered what that old man would have thought of her hurtling through frigid skies five miles up at four-hundred miles an hour while sheathed in nothing more than a shiny aluminum tube with padded seats.
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