The Monkey King: A Jack Selden Spy Novel
NOBODY COUNTS THE MAN IN THE MASK.
In the lantern-lit river town of Hoi An, Vietnam, a man dies at the heart of the night market - four thousand witnesses, and the only thing every version of the story agrees on is a monkey. A Monkey King: one of the costumed performers who work the crowds every night, gold mask, red robes, identical at ten paces. The perfect disguise isn't hiding. It's being watched all evening and never once seen.
Jack Selden knows something about that. Four months in town, the American expat has finally become part of the scenery - which is exactly why a careful man named Crosby needs him. The dead man was walking to a secret meeting when he fell. Somebody sold that meeting. And the only person Crosby can trust to find the leak is the one man who was never inside his operation.
What follows pulls Jack through a counterfeit wine empire, a recruitment pitch on a moonlit yacht, a midnight chase across the shrimp ponds - and into the arms of a woman whose booked-solid week ended the night the killing happened. Because in a town where every kindness might be an approach, the hardest thing Jack has to do isn't spy. It's fall in love without turning it into surveillance.
A slow-burn espionage thriller about trust, disguise, and the price of noticing - for readers who like their spy fiction atmospheric, character-driven, and human to the bone.
Book Two in the Jack Selden series, and a complete story in itself. New readers are welcome here; the story begins with The French Concession.
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