Hello and welcome to our stop on the Mongkok Station blog tour!
Thank you very much to Emma @ Damppebbles and Jake Needham for providing a copy of the book to [K]
The review below is 100% honest and all of her own views.
Blurb:
A city that’s falling apart, a man who’s falling apart, and a girl with a secret past who has disappeared without a trace. What complicates things is that the missing girl is the daughter of one of the most powerful men in America. She just doesn’t know it.
Hong Kong is teetering on the edge of anarchy. Violent street battles are raging between riot police and mobs demanding democracy.
Samuel Tay is a legendary Singapore homicide detective. He’s retired, but it was purely involuntary. It seems his legend made a lot of senior officers uneasy and they wanted him gone. John August is an American who has shadowy connections to the intelligence community. He’s done Tay a lot of favors in the past, and Tay owes him one.
When August asks Tay to come to Hong Kong to track down the missing girl, Tay doesn’t much want to go. August and his friends deal in the fate of nations. Tay deals with personal tragedies, one human being at a time. Even worse, he doesn’t like Hong Kong and, to be completely honest, he’s not all that fond of Americans either.
Regardless, Tay answers August’s call for help. He’s a man who honors his debts, his forced retirement really sucks, and there’s this woman… well, there’s always a woman in there somewhere, isn’t there?
August thinks that the triads may have kidnapped the missing girl. Tay doesn’t have the sources to get inside the Hong Kong triads so August teams him up with Jack Shepherd, an American lawyer living in Hong Kong who just might be the only white guy on the planet the triads trust.
Tay is considerably less than thrilled by that. Here he is in a city that seems only moments away from going up in flames, everybody is certain the missing girl is dead, and now he’s stuck with all these Americans. Can things get any worse than that? Oh yes, they absolutely can.
Tay has developed symptoms that indicate he may be very seriously ill. For everybody, there is always a last time around the track whether they know it when they make the trip or not. As Tay’s symptoms worsen, it begins to dawn on him that this missing girl just might be his own last time around.
If this really is the end for him, Samuel Tay vows he’s going to go out with one hell of a bang.
Review:
Retired Homicide Dectective Sam Tay has to go to Hong Kong which he does as a favour to a friend to help find a missing girl, even though missing persons is not his forte he agrees as he is not a person to not fulfill his debts.
Thrust into the midst of the volatile atmosphere of Hong Kong and finding he himself may be ill, Sam has to find the missing girl before it is too late, for either of them.
When I first met Sam I wasn’t too sure what to make of him, a grumpy retired Singaporean Homicide Detective with a smoking habit. I found him to be a brilliant character that I loved reading how the cogs turned in his head as he worked through the case. I found the other characters to be intriguing (and am happy to see that one actually has a spin off series which I will be investigating after this review) and wonder about their past history with Tay.
I found the setting to be a clever idea, Hong Kong on the cusp of a new regime being implemented, the upset and the possibility of a quiet street, not being just a quiet street for long. Sam having a quiet smoking break and mulling the case one minute, the next everything changes to interrupt his train of thought.
This was a well paced story, that kept me reading and guessing til the very end. Even though this was my first Sam Tay book but will not be my last. I am off to dig out the back catalogue now and put on my present list!
[K]
Author Bio:
Jake Needham is an American lawyer who became a screen and television writer through a series of coincidences too ridiculous for anyone to believe. When he realized he didn’t really like movies and television all that much, he started writing crime novels.
Mr. Needham has lived in Asia for thirty years and has published twelve novels that have collectively sold more than three-quarters of a million copies. He, his wife, and their two sons now divide their time between homes in Bangkok and Washington DC.
You can learn more about Mr. Needham and his novels at his official website: http://www.JakeNeedhamNovels.com.
Social Media:
Publishing Information:
Published in paperback and digital formats by Half Penny Ltd on 8th October 2020
You can buy Mongkok Station from the following booksellers (and obviously many more! Support your local booksellers where you can!)
Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US) | Amazon (AU)
The P.Turners Book Blog 
Thanks for being part of the blog tour xx
LikeLike