Citizen One Main Market Edition

Beneath the five interlinked rings of the Olympic flag, young women are being raped, mutilated and entombed in the concrete foundations of the new National Stadium.

A prostitute, her beauty now ruined by a jigsaw of razor cuts . . . and the star of the People’s Republic carved deeply into her abdomen.

Shanghai-based Senior Inspector Sun Piao has recently been released from Ankang – a mental hospital where he was sent for his own safety after his last case. Soon it becomes clear that the girls are being murdered by well-protected officers of the People’s Liberation Army and Sun Piao cannot get close. His only hope is to approach the mysterious and powerful Citizen One . . .

Praise for Andy Oakes’ first novel: ‘The picture conjured up of Shanghai and of the complexities of a corrupt and claustrophobic China is gripping . . . it is the long, stealthy shadow of the state falling across its pages that marks this crime novel out as something of an original in its genre’ Observer