City on Fire

A Novel of Hong Kong

Simon Elegant

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.

Simon Elegant was the Southeast Asia bureau chief for DowJones News Service, the Hong Kong arts and society editor and Malaysia correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review, the Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine, and taught undergraduate modern Chinese history at the Beijing Center for China Studies. Among the six languages he speaks are Mandarin and Malay. He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), a fictional biography of China’s greatest poet, Li Bai.  He was also the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, the goto restaurant for top-end Continental dining in China’s capital.

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Endorsements & Reviews

“City on Fire is a gripping, terrific novel.” Adrian McKinty, bestselling writer of the award-winning thriller The Chain and the Sean Duffy novels