A Loyal Character DancerFormer dancer and party loyalist Wen Liping vanishes in rural China just before she was to leave the country. Her husband, a key witness against a smuggling ring suspected of importing aliens to the US, refuses to testify until she is found and brought to join him in America. A few days later, a badly mutilated body turns up in Shanghai's Bund Park. It bears all the hallmarks of a triad killing. The US immigration agency, convinced that the Chinese

as it does

' As she wrote she imagined a stand of Scots pine

The Benthams have been married for nearly 25 years

Alone from the old group

Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel

It's the rest of the world's

finding Anchorage

Running through each story is a charm bracelet which brings bad luck wherever it's found

She feels responsible for her behaviour

from the young children of a Tamil building-site worker to a privileged and alienated schoolboy

Dark has been largely above suspicion during those years of self-recrimination

Recalled to Paris for the first time in four years