A romantic thriller set in Asia, In the Southern Cross dares to expose the lurid underside of traditional Chinese culture — where love and offshore dealings mix all too easily, where honesty and ambition lead straight to danger.

Headstrong maritime investigator Zack Townsend arrives in Singapore — his first trip to Asia — to track down a stolen cargo of microchips. But secretly, he has come to find Claire, an irresistible Eurasian woman who inexplicably vanished after a whirlwind romance in Baltimore.

Bursting with bull-in-a-china-shop clarity, already chafing at the shackles the local culture has put on his investigation and certain that it is the port police who are the thieves — Zack finds his Malaysian helper murdered! Staggered, but confident in his own resourcefulness, he ‘disappears’ a ship to outwit these adversaries — just what the real smugglers, including his new boss Salvia, intended.

Worse, Zack has begun to grasp that his beloved Claire was sent to Baltimore — by Salvia — precisely to get him here… to be duped into doing what no one else could or would do!

With Zack pursued by ruthless smugglers and wanted for fraud and murder by those who ought to protect and help him, his life hanging by a thread, the story climaxes in a desperate chase across East Asia to intercept the missing ship, now racing north from the tropics and loaded with deadly, untraceable weapons — and to free the fleeing, trapped, tortured, mysterious Claire.

A truly eye-opening journey! With a sure grasp of Asian cultures and business, Southern Cross lets Westerners see into the cauldron of longings, desperate ambition, repression, corruption and matter-of-fact cruelty that characterize the dark side of today’s Far East.

— Michael P. Solomon, author of Japan in a Nutshell

WGAw Reg. No. 722035