"The Foreigner announces the arrival of the very talented Francie Lin. Brilliantly observed and written with a scalpel, this violent plunge into the abyss of identity runs on the hot rails of the ambitious thriller. A flat-out page-turner."

--COLIN HARRISON, author of The Havana Room and The Finder

EMERSON CHANG is a mild-mannered bachelor who’s just turned forty, a financial analyst in a neatly pressed suit, a child of Taiwanese immigrants who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese, and, well, a virgin. His only real family is his mother, whose subtle manipulations have kept him close all his life in the name of preserving an obscure idea of family and culture.

But when his mother suddenly dies, Emerson sets out for Taipei to scatter her ashes, and to convey a disputed inheritance to his younger brother, Little P. Now enmeshed in the Taiwanese criminal underworld, Little P seems to be running some very shady business out of his uncle’s karaoke bar, and he conceals a secret--a crime that not only has severed him from his family but also annihilated his most basic sense of humanity. Hoping to appease both the living and the dead, Emerson isn’t about to give up the inheritance until he uncovers Little P’s secrets and saves what is left of his family.

The Foreigner is a darkly comic tale of crime and contrition, and a riveting story about what it means to be a foreigner--even in one’s own family.