Set amidst the urban fantasia of Hong Kong, William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels raise crime fiction to a high art form. Surrealistic and suspenseful, vivid in their procedural details and brilliant in their scope, they are the work of a uniquely gifted writer. "As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future." - New York Times Book Review "Marshall's novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure." - TIME In the seamy Hong Bay district of Hong Kong, crimes of every shape and size were commonplace. But not letter bombs. Not till Mr Leung and Mr Ramaswamy were successively spread bloodily over the office walls. When Detective Inspector Spencer narrowly escaped becoming victim number 3, the Yellowthread Street police were grimly determined to track down the culprit before the Special Branch got to him. But unless they could find the link between the neatly timed warning letters, the ghosts in the Chinese graveyard and the strange mission of Mr Conway Kan the millionaire, the killer would go free ... Gelignite is another tense and exciting drama from the pen of a master. Full of real police procedure, suspense and fine irony, but with whole extra dimensions of the surreal and the poignant, William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels have no real compare. For those open to their charms, this series is a hidden masterpiece of crime fiction.