the hidden place and the other time

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.

The second book in the Nine Secrets series focuses on gravity. The setting in 1500's Japan, the sport is sumo, and the protagonist is Isenoumi Miwa, only daughter of the man who owns the Isenoumi sumo stable.

Hit the cut to meet the fiercely ambitious Miwa, and learn about the secrets she keeps...

(Wow, there is a lot of cultural stuff to absorb around sumo. My information-gathering runs are filled with detours into Shinto tradition and Japanese cultural and military history.)

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