The Far Away Man

Book excerpt: His eyes are pale and expressionless. His intent is deadly. The Far Away Man kills with an antique; an 1891 single-shot target pistol. A single shot is all that he needs. His first victim is a shoe-shine man of no fixed abode. His second, an aristocratic naval officer. His third, a Chinese fortune teller. The only thing that ties the crimes together: a bundle of faded cholera vaccination certificates. And the killing is far from over. A case this bizarre calls for the colourful detectives of Yellowthread Street. This time things are going to get personal. Join them on an investigation that will send Christopher O’Yee digging deep in Hong Kong’s dark underbelly, and Harry Feiffer into his own forgotten past. The ninth book in William Marshall’s classic series is one of his most intimate, an examination of gun violence and remorse laced with his trademark humour and surrealism. Praise for the Yellowthread Street series: “Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World “Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle “Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly “Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer “Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune “Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press “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 “Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews “Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times