In this tightly woven page-turner by Colin Harrison, Jin Li, a young Chinese woman with an advanced university degree, engages in industrial espionage, setting off a series of violent events.
Jin Li's official job, as a graveyard shift supervisor for a Manhattan-based janitorial service, is to collect office waste to be shredded and incinerated. But her real function is to sift through the company's discarded faxes, reports and other confidential documents for nuggets of potentially useful inside information, which she relays to her brother, a devious Shanghai financier who wreaks havoc by causing a pharmaceutical company's shares to plummet.
Two of Jin Li's female Mexican coworkers are brutally murdered. Realizing she was the killer's real target, the Chinese woman flees for her life, initiating a tense game of hide-and-seek.