Hello and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Beijing Conspiracy by Shamini Flint. I’m sharing a extract today, but before I do that here’s what the book is all about:
“
“I need your support. There is no one else I can trust. Please help her. Please help our daughter.” When ex-Marine Jack Ford receives a letter containing news of a daughter he never knew he had, he feels compelled to return to China, a country he hasn’t visited since 1989 when, as a young American spy, he fell in love with a beautiful student activist and found himself caught up in the horrors of the Tiananmen Square massacre. But why has Xia got in touch now, after a thirty-year silence? On arrival in Beijing, Jack finds himself accidentally in possession of an explosive piece of information both the Chinese and American governments are desperate to get their hands on. Alone in a strange city, suspected of being a traitor by his own side, not knowing whom to trust, Jack is faced with an impossible dilemma: should he save his new-found daughter or prevent a new world war from breaking out? “
Available from: Hive – Waterstones – amazonuk
Extract
So that’s why they want you? They want the Tank Man?’ Xia asked. ‘Do you know where he is?’
Jack, dragged back to the present and their current predicament, shrugged. What did it matter? They had Fei Yen.
‘Why do they want him? Now? After all this time?’
‘Why do you think? It isn’t to give him a bunch of flowers.’
‘Will you do it?’ Xia’s voice was as taut as a wire. Her gaze was focused on him like a laser, searing, intense, persuasive.
‘Will I turn myself over to a bunch of thugs in exchange for my daughter? Is that what you’re asking me?’
Jack rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. They’d tracked him down and taken his daughter to force him to talk. It wasn’t a great parenting debut, that was for sure.
‘I suppose it depends on whether she really is my daughter.’
He was making it difficult, and he wasn’t even sure why. He’d known how this was going to play out from the moment Fei Yen had been taken. But now he was messing with Xia. Perhaps there was a small part of him that still wanted to hurt her, to pay her back for what she’d done to him all those years ago. A hand went to his neck, just under the collarbone. Felt the ridge of scar tissue. A bullet had grazed him on the way to killing the soldier in the dirt next to him. Not his only wound, not his only brush with death. She’d been the reason he’d taken the road less travelled through the roughest parts of the globe – looking for some righteousness to take the bad taste out of his mouth. Did that make every scar he bore her responsibility?
‘Yes, she is your daughter. Do you think I would lie about something like that?’
The short answer to that question was yes.
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About The Author
Shamini Flint lives in Singapore with her husband and two children. She began her career in law in Malaysia and also worked at an international law firm in Singapore. She travelled extensively around Asia for her work, before resigning to be a stay-at-home mum, writer, part-time lecturer and environmental activist, all in an effort to make up for her ‘evil’ past as a corporate lawyer! Shamini writes children’s books with cultural and environmental themes including Jungle Blues and Turtle takes a Trip as well as the ‘Sasha’ series of children’s books. She also writes crime fiction featuring the rotund Singaporean policeman, Inspector Singh. Singh travels around Asia stumbling over corpses and sampling the food …
