Well, the birth of this baby sure took a long time, but it’s now available in print and eBook formats at all the usual suspects, including this website. I hope you like it. It doesn’t exactly follow the “formula” of After the Auction, but it’s definitely a sequel–branding Lily as the “Jewish Miss Marple.”
The route she takes on this caper starts in New York City, moves to San Francisco, thence to Shanghai, and ends again in Israel. And there’s a back story section in letter form that begins in Bombay (before it was called Mumbai) and progresses to Shanghai and finally to Hong Kong. Baghdad and Iraq are shadowy references throughout.
Shanghai Bund
The book cover shows the Shanghai waterfront along the Bund sometime in the 1930s. Bund, pronounced like fund with a B, means embankment or quay in Hindi, and the wide boulevard and promenade overlook the Huangpu River, a branch of the Yangtze. Some of the most prominent older buildings in Shanghai run along the Bund, including the Peace Hotel, formerly the Cathay, which Lily and Simon visit while in Shanghai. But they stayed in the Jin Jiang Hotel in the French Concession area. The skyscraper and fancy cars were not there in 1991, when this book is set. The hotel is famous as the site of one session of meetings held by Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon during Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit to China.
Thanks for your support. More location photos to come!
The entrance of the Jin Jiang viewed within its compound.
The entrance to the Jin Jiang Hotel.
The beautifully remodeled Peace Hotel, restored to the elegance of its predecessor, the Cathay. Not so when Lily and Simon (and I, in 2002) visited it. Gorgeous now, a Fairmont.
Lily would have loved to swim in the Peace Hotel pool. I have!
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