City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong - Hardcover

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by Simon Elegant (Author)

A police detective in Hong Kong races to solve a vicious murder, while the city around him teeters on the brink of destruction.

Hong Kong is a city ablaze--its streets filled with protesters, its government in crisis, its people torn between rage and fear of what defiance might cost. At the center stands Superintendent Killian Tong, once a rising star in the police, now disgraced and haunted by a tragic accident at a protest. Exiled to a remote post, Killian is called back when a dismembered body is uncovered in a landfill. The gruesome murder could be his path to redemption--if he can withstand mounting pressure from superiors desperate to bury the truth, and the even more dangerous fractures within his own family.

His beloved younger sister Jun refuses to speak to him, devoting herself to the protest movement. Once inseparable, the siblings now face each other across barricades, Jun's fierce commitment pulling her closer to arrest and ruin.

As Killian follows the murder trail into Hong Kong's highest corridors of power, he must confront not only the city's corruption, but the searing question at his heart: When politics ignites a family war, can love survive the flames?

City on Fire is both a taut thriller and a deeply human story of loyalty, betrayal, and the search for redemption in a city under siege.

Author Biography

Simon Elegant is China bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Taiwan. Previously, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Asia including Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Elegant was the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, which won the 2019 readers' choice award from TripAdvisor as the world's best restaurant.

He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), about China's greatest poet, Li Bai, a novel that succeeded "in summoning up the man and his age in ways that are both deliciously foreign and all too familiar," according to the New York Times.

Number of Pages: 288

Dimensions: 1.2 x 9.1 x 5.9 IN

Publication Date: May 05, 2026