In Flower Net, Lisa See rips the veil away from modern China- its venerable culture, its teeming economy, its institutional cruelty- and highlights the inextricable link between China's fortunes and America's. This is a Gorky Park for our time, a complex, suspenseful, beautifully written novel in which a Chinese cop and an American attorney pair up to uncover the deadly conspiracy of Chinese gangs, government, and big business that lies behind a series of high-profile murders.

In the depths of a Beijing winter, during the waning days of Deng Xiaoping's reign, the U,S. ambassador's son is found dead--his body entobed in a frozen lake. Around the same time, aboard a ship adrift off the coast of Southern California, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Stark makes a startling discovery: the corpse of a Red Prince, a scion of China's polit-ical elite.

The Chinese and American governments suspect that t e deaths are connected, and in an unprecedented move, they join forces to see justice done. In Beijing, David teams np with the unorthodox police detective Liu Hulan. In an investigation that takes them to every cor-ner of China and sparks an intense attraction between the two, David and ttulan discover a web linking human trafficking to the drug trade and to overnmental treachery--a web reaching from the Forbidden City to the heart of Los Angeles and, like the wide flower net used by Chinese fishermen, threatening to ensnare all within its reach.