The Dead Can't Make a Living: A Taipei Night Market Novel, Book 5 book cover

FROM THE BOOK JACKET: 

Jing-nan, the owner of the most popular food stand in Taipei's world-famous Shilin night market, is hauling trash after a successful evening of hawking Taiwanese delicacies to tourists when he finds a corpse propped up against the dumpsters. The dead man turns out to be Juan Ramos, a Philippine national who came to Taiwan for a job at a massive ZHD food processing plant.

Jing-nan is haunted by Ramos's story, and by the heartbreak of his family, who arrive in Taipei looking for answers. ZHD has a history of safety violations, and activists have a hunch Ramos's death might be part of a cover-up. Meanwhile, Jingnan's gangster uncle, Big Eye, has his own mysterious, probably illegal, reasons for being concerned about what's going on in ZHD. He pressures Jing-nan into a daring and risky mission: going undercover as a migrant laborer to get a job at the food processing plant and reporting back about the conditions inside. Jing-nan hopes to find out the truth for the Ramos family, and to save other immigrant lives—but first he has to survive the spy operation.


Ed LinABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

I'm a native New Yorker of Taiwanese and Chinese descent. My current mystery series is set at a night-market stand in contemporary Taipei, and includes the books Ghost Month, Incensed, and 99 Ways to Die. It's published by the amazing folks at Soho Crime. I also have an older crime series set in Manhattan's Chinatown in 1976 and that includes the books This Is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run, and One Red Bastard. My first book is a non-mystery, a dirty "literary" book titled Waylaid that was published way back in 2002.

I'm the first author to have won three Asian American Literary Awards. I have a degree in mining engineering from Columbia University and a master's in journalism, also from Columbia. I have a day job editing financial news. I live in New York with my incredible wife, the actress Cindy Cheung, and our son.


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