Excerpt from Flash House by Aimee E. Liu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Back in the car she squinted into the glare and, as she drove on to work, turned her thoughts defiantly to Aidan and their last night together. "Lying in wait," he'd joked when she tugged back the sheet and found him naked and preposterously ready. He'd gotten up onto his knees and slid her nightgown off over her head, then trailed his fingertips the length of her body, teasing her with affection and focusing all his restless energy into their mutual desire. Afterward, they lay cupped together drawing spirals on their sweat-slick skin and talking softly about the madness that seemed poised to engulf them.

Over the past few years J. Edgar Hoover and his friends with the China Lobby had repeatedly targeted Aidan, in part because he was half Chinese, but mostly for his articles criticizing Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist Chinese government. After learning there were wiretaps on Aidan's phone and surveillance teams following him to and from the Washington office, the Herald finally assigned him to India to get him out of sight. But Aidan did not stop writing his stories, and just last month he sent off a particularly inflammatory piece, which his Australian friend Lawrence Malcolm archly dubbed "The Generalissimo's Rag Team." The highlight of the article was a description of fourteen-year-old Nationalist conscripts wearing rags for shoes as they stood in the snow guarding a restaurant where Madame Chiang Kai-shek was accepting personal "gifts" of diamond jewelry and sipping French champagne with three notorious Shanghainese mobsters and their concubines. Joanna agreed with Aidan that this was one of the best pieces he 'd ever written and she believed every word of it. But scathing honesty about the Chiangs was still out of fashion in Washington, so two weeks ago Aidan was demoted from Delhi bureau chief to special correspondent. With the demotion came a directive. As Aidan put it, "Prove my Stars and Stripes and set the crusaders at ease." His objective in Kashmir was to write something damning against the Communists in the U.N. peace commission.

"Or else . . . ?" Joanna finally dared to ask. "I suppose they'll order me home. Fire me. Send me up before the Un-American Activities Committee for one of their show trials, followed by the blacklist or jail. Or, they could just deport me. America, the beautiful."

A shiver raced up Joanna's spine now as she recalled the bitterness in his voice. Up ahead a public bus had tipped over on its side and passengers were blithely scrambling out the windows as peddlers plied them with mangoes.

Farther on, a makeshift fair blared scratchy Indian film songs as two men hand-cranked a rickety wooden Ferris wheel stuffed full of schoolgirls in navy and pink, and all around the edges families camped under black tarpaulins or shreds of filthy matting. Lepers crouched caressing their wounds. Snake charmers held up cobras. And there, that old, old man in a soiled lungi curled down at the feet of a fat young dandy wearing movie star sunglasses. Joanna felt a surge of despair. Who exactly was in charge of doling out power in this world, and why did it always seem to wind up in the hands of those who deserved it least?

She braked to avoid a sauntering cow and squeezed the car between two battered cycle rickshaws in front of Safe Haven. In frustration she banged the heel of her hand, inadvertently tooting the horn. A child standing too close to the car jumped back as if struck, then immediately started forward again.

Joanna braced for the expected thrust of a palm through the open window, the stroking, pleading flurry of fingers demanding money or sweets--or perhaps delivering a trumped-up accusation that she had been struck. But though the girl was scrawny, bedraggled, and filthy as a beggar, her hair matted and her pajamalike salwar kameez stiff with embedded dust, she stood with dignity, watching and waiting as if expected.

Copyright © 2003 by Aimee E. Liu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.