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