Her romantic entanglement with Secret Service agent Jim Sanders, for example, is inhibited by his apparently jealous partner, Jennifer Evans. Larew maintains a relatively simple mystery, which effectively juggles Lee’s multiple predicaments. The questions only build when there’s another disappearance, followed shortly thereafter by a murder. Lee pokes around bank accounts and makes inquiries, but her investigation turns personal when she uncovers a decades-old connection between the Chau Fong and both Sidney and her late father, Bill.

Cops arrested him during the demonstrations (along with others, including Lee), but now Percy, like his dad, is missing. Henry’s son, Percy, is equally perplexing. But Lee can’t immediately link the antiques dealer to anything illicit that would involve the triads. She learns the men took Henry to a bar owned by the criminal triad group Chau Fong. She tails them but gets caught in a frenzied mob of democracy demonstrators. Unfortunately, almost as soon as Lee makes it to Wong Antiques, she spots two strangers leading Henry away. Though Lee no longer works for Sidney Worthington, she agrees to see if anything is amiss with his friend and Hong Kong contact Henry Wong, who hasn’t made contact in nearly two months. She had to answer that question quickly, before she was sent on a one-way trip to Karachi.In Larew’s ( Aftermath, 2017, etc.) thriller, Lee Carruthers’ latest case takes her to Hong Kong to check on her ex–CIA boss’s contact. He might have been collateral damage in the war between Malyakov and Gringikov for control of the post-Soviet arms trade, but Lee had to determine if Branson still worked for the CIA when he was killed or if he'd sold out and if so, to whom. In Istanbul he was Karl Spiegel, and he worked for Belarusian arms dealer Felix Gringikov. In Dubai he was Gil Brady, and he worked for the Russian merchant of death Sergei Malyakov. He was a CIA officer, but she discovered that he had other identities as well. Lead had already begun to fly before former CIA analyst Lee Carruthers could get to Dubai to investigate the death of George Branson, and each question she asked ratcheted the danger up by a notch. He might have been collateral damage in the war.

Dead in Dubai by Marilynn Larew