Nine Secrets: Opium and Silver

This is my quick blurb for Opium and Silver--I was putting links to upcoming projects in my sidebar, and I realized I never managed to finish and post this one.

So, meet Qiu Luo, a thief with a number of weaknesses...


This is my Hong Kong. Laid out before me, a feast of wealth for the taking. My Hong Kong, from the whores and the addicts to the wealthy British who live in the View, from harbor to hill, all mine. It might as well be stamped "property of Qiu Luo".

And here fate has provided me with the perfect mark. John Forbes. Wealthy. Eccentric. And himself a thief with a grudge against his own people. I can already tell me he's going to teach me much, before I rob him blind and disappear.

There's a complication, though. John's shown me some things, powers I don't yet fully understand. He bends metal with strange liquids, mends chains without a forge. I have to learn what he knows, but with every heartbeat I stay, I get pulled farther into John's insane schemes to stop the British from taking over this country with nothing more than poppy dust and a gun or three. And now there's more--signs that the book that supplies John's powers has a companion somewhere out there, in the hands of someone who is using it not for thievery, but for murder.

Against uncanny powers and the British empire, we have John's mind, my daring, and one old book about metal. The odds are very, very long that we will live through this, much less manage to stem the tide of opium and prevent yet another war over the drug.

Fortunately, I've always been a gambler.

Nine Secrets: Fever and Rebirth

And another of the Nine Secrets beginnings that I forgot to post. This one's a bit longer and doesn't really give any sense of the book's central conflict, but it might give a bit of a hint as to who the protagonist is, and why she chooses to become the bearer of one of the secrets.


( Anandi bent over her daughter’s bed, trying not to weep... )