The Girl with a Thousand Faces

Mercy Chan works as a ghost-talker for a triad in Kowloon Walled City, the crowded and notorious slum in Hong Kong. She arrived there during World War II, washed up on the shore with no memory of who she was. The city took her in, and in the years since the war she has built a life out of settling the angry, bitter spirits that haunt its streets.

That life is threatened when an unusually powerful ghost starts killing in the district's waterways, drowning innocent people one after another. The spirit claims to know Mercy. It also claims to know the childhood she cannot recall, and that claim is what keeps her from simply walking away.

The book is a historical dark fantasy with a supernatural horror streak, set in the years just after the war. The focus falls on a single woman and the one enemy that seems to know her better than she knows herself. Mercy and the ghost circle each other in a deadly game of cat and mouse, and the mystery of her missing past drives the plot.

Expect an atmospheric read, with a setting crowded with lost and traumatised people and a threat that is personal as well as deadly. As the hunt goes on, Mercy begins to suspect that the monster she is fighting may be one she helped create.