Eliot Pattison

Ordered to find another prisoner accountable for a series of suspicious deaths aboard a British convict ship, Duncan McCallum follows a series of clues that lead him into the heart of the French and Indian War and finds himself in love with the daughter of a man to whom he is indentured.

Bone Rattler

A Chinese official is murdered in a slave camp in Tibet. One of the prisoners, a disgraced Chinese prosecutor, is ordered to write a report accusing a Buddhist monk. He discovers the real culprits are Chinese officials and American miners, but the truth may hurt the camp more than a lie.

The skull mantra

Thirty years after global holocaust, the colony of Carthage still struggles to build its new world. While steam engines and other early industrial technology have empowered its economy, the fragile society is undermined by secret crimes, rifts between generations, government censorship, and a legacy of casting out those who suffer from radiation sickness. Embittered survivor Hadrian Boone—once a revered colony founder—has been hounded by despair and the ghosts of his past into a life of drunkenness and frequent imprisonment for challenging the governor's tyranny. But when a gentle old man, the colony's leading scientist, is murdered, Hadrian glimpses chilling secrets behind the killing that could destroy the colony. Realizing that he may be the only one able to expose the truth, Hadrian begins a desperate quest through the underbelly of the colony into the wrenching camps of the outcasts, escorted by a young policewoman who struggles to cope with the physical and emotional remnants of the prior world. Ultimately Hadrian's journey becomes one of self–discovery, and to find justice his greatest challenge is navigating the tortuous path of the human spirit in a world that has been forever fractured.

A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America

Ashes of the Earth

a mystery of post-apocalyptic America

Ashes of the earth

A Mystery of the American Revolution

Freedom's Ghost

Bone Mountain

"Shan Tao Yun, now the reluctant constable of a remote Tibetan town, has learned to expect the impossible at the roof of the world, but nothing has prepared him for his discovery when he investigates a report that a nun has been savagely assaulted by ghosts. In an ancient tomb by the old nun lies a gilded saint buried centuries earlier, flanked by the remains of a Chinese soldier killed fifty years before and an American man murdered only hours earlier. Shan is thrust into a maelstrom of intrigue and contradiction. The Tibetans are terrified, the notorious Public Security Bureau wants nothing to do with the murders, and the army seems determined to just bury the dead again and Shan with them. No one wants to pursue the truth-except Shan, who finds himself in a violent collision between a heartbreaking, clandestine effort to reunite Tibetan refugees separated for decades and a covert corruption investigation that reaches to the top levels of the government in Beijing. The terrible secret Shan uncovers changes his town and his life forever"--

Skeleton god

"When Shan Tao Yun and his old friend Lokesh are abruptly dragged away by Public Security, he is convinced that their secret, often illegal, support of struggling Tibetans has brought their final ruin. But his fear turns to confusion as he discovers he has been chosen to fill a vacancy on a special international commission investigating Tibetan suicides. Soon he finds that his predecessor was murdered, and when a monk sets himself on fire in front of the commissioners he realizes that the Commission is being used as a tool to whitewash Tibet's self-immolation protests as acts of crime and terrorism. Shan faces an impossible dilemma when the Public Security officer who runs the Commission, Major Ren, orders the imprisoned Lokesh beaten to coerce Shan into following Beijing's script for the Commission. He has no choice but to become part of the hated machine that is devouring Tibet, but when he discovers that the most recent immolation was actually another murder, he realizes the Commission itself is riddled with crime and intrigue. Everywhere he turns, Shan finds new secrets that seem to lead to the last agonizing chapter of his life. Shan must make a final desperate effort to uncover the Commission's terrible secrets whose painful truth could change Shan's life - and possibly that of many Tibetans - forever"--

Soul of the fire

Former Beijing police investigator Shan Tao Yun heads for a remote Tibetan plateau to investigate the murder of a venerated teacher and the subsequent disappearance of a lama.

Water Touching Stone

In den Bergen Tibets wird die Leiche eines hohen chinesischen Funktionärs gefunden. Inspektor Shan, der zusammen mit inhaftierten tibetischen Mönchen in der Nähe beim Strassenbau eingesetzt ist, wird mit der Aufklärung des heiklen Falles betraut.

Roman

Der fremde Tibeter

Bones of the Earth is Edgar Award-winning author Eliot Pattison’s much anticipated tenth and final installment in the internationally acclaimed Inspector Shan series. After Shan Tao Yun is forced to witness the execution of a Tibetan for corruption, he can’t shake the suspicion that he has instead witnessed a murder arranged by conspiring officials. When he learns that a Tibetan monk has been accused by the same officials of using Buddhist magic to murder soldiers then is abruptly given a badge as special deputy to the county governor, Inspector Shan realizes he is being thrust into a ruthless power struggle. Knowing he has made too many enemies in the government, Shan desperately wants to avoid such a battle, but then discovers that among its casualties are a murdered American archaeology student and devout Tibetans who were only trying to protect an ancient shrine. Soon grasping that the underlying mysteries are rooted in both the Chinese and Tibetan worlds, Shan senses that he alone may be able to find the truth. The path he must take, with the enigmatic, vengeful father of the dead American at his side, is the most treacherous he has ever navigated. More will die before he is able to fully pierce the secrets of this clash between the angry gods of Tibet and Beijing. The costs to Shan and those close to him will be profoundly painful, and his world will be shaken to its core before he crafts his own uniquely Tibetan form of justice.

An Inspector Shan Tao Yun Mystery

Bones of the Earth

Attempting to establish a new life in colonial America at the height of the war between the French and British, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum is wrongly accused of murdering a settlement of Christian Indians and finds himself targeted by soldiers and rebels who are threatening the Native American way of life. By the Edgar Award-winning author of The Skull Mantra.

A Mystery of Colonial America

Original Death

A simple task to retrieve some artifacts turns into a nightmare of deceit when Duncan McCallum finds himself the target of those obsessed with keeping America under British rule in this thrilling historical novel from an Edgar Award–winning author. When Duncan McCallum is asked by Benjamin Franklin to retrieve an astonishing cache of fossils from the Kentucky wilderness, his excitement as a naturalist blinds him to his treacherous path. But as murderers stalk him Duncan discovers that the fossils of this American incognitum are not nearly as mysterious as the political intrigue driving his mission. The Sons of Liberty insist, without explaining why, that the only way to keep the king from pursuing a bloody war with America is for Duncan to secretly deliver the fossils to Franklin in London. His journey becomes a maze of deceit and violence as he seeks the cryptic link between the bones and the king. Every layer that Duncan peels away invites new treachery by those obsessed with crushing American dissent. With each attempt on his life, Duncan questions the meaning of the liberty he and the Sons seek. His last desperate hope for survival, and the rescue of his aged native friend Conawago―imprisoned in Bedlam―requires the help of freed slaves, an aristocratic maiden, a band of street urchins, and the gods of his tribal allies.

The King's Beast

Aboard a British convict ship bound for the New World, Duncan McCallum witnesses a series of murders and seeming suicides among his fellow Scottish prisoners that thrusts him into the bloody maw of the French and Indian War. As the only man aboard...

Bone Rattler [Large Print]

Winner of the 2001 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, The Skull Mantra was a sensation when first published and received wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. The Skull Mantra is ranked as a novel about a people and a place--the Tibetans of the high Himalayas--as it is a gripping thriller. The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending someone high up in Beijing's power structure. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people's desperate fight for its sacred mountains and the Chinese regime's blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is innocent. Now time is running out for Shan to find the real killer. The Skull Mantra is the winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

The Skull Mantra

When disgraced former inspector, Shan Tao Yun joins a group of reverent Tibetans returning a sacred artefact to its home, it seems he has at last found the peace he has struggled for since leaving prison. What starts as a spiritual pilgrimage, however, quickly turns into a desperate flight through the Tibetan wilderness as the outlawed monk who guides them is murdered and Sham discovers that the artefact has recently been stolen from the Chinese army. But why is the army so desperate to find the artefact entrusted to Shan? Why is an aged medicine lama being stalked by government agents? Why has an American woman, a geologist for an oil company, abandoned the project and fled into the mountains? Shan discovers not answers, but only new mysteries as he is drawn to such unexpected places as the raucous headquarters base of the Western oil venture and a monastery that seems more attuned to the teachings of the party than those of Buddha. And the further he travels into the mountains, the more Shan realises that what is at stake is not only justice but the spiritual survival of those who have joined his strange quest. At the heart of Pattison's powerful tale is a story of a brave, oppressed people who have learned to endure by drawing strength from their land and their rich spiritual traditions.

Shan Tao Yun is an exiled Chinese national, a former Beijing Investigator, on parole from the Tibetan gulag to which he had been consigned as punishment. Leading a mule bearing a corpse at the request of a local wisewoman, he comes upon a traffic acciden

The Lord of Death

Murders and mysteries abound in a remote Tibetan village in this novel in the Edgar Award–winning series. Shan Tao Yun, formerly an investigator in Beijing, has been asked to help save a comatose man. The man is believed to be guilty of two murders in which the victims’ arms were removed—but when the detective arrives, he discovers that the suspect is not actually Tibetan, but Navajo. The man has come here with his niece, seeking the ancestral ties between their people and the ancient Bon. Together with his friends, the monks Gendun and Lokesh, Shan must not only sort out the crime’s true perpetrator, but attempt to solve the riddle of a mountain that is said to be the place “where the world begins” . . .

Prayer of the Dragon

In Mandarin Gate, Edgar Award winner Eliot Pattison brings Shan back in a thriller that navigates the explosive political and religious landscape of Tibet. In an earlier time, Shan Tao Yun was an Inspector stationed in Beijing. But he lost his position, his family and his freedom when he ran afoul of a powerful figure high in the Chinese government. Released unofficially from the work camp to which he'd been sentenced, Shan has been living in remote mountains of Tibet with a group of outlawed Buddhist monks. Without status, official identity, or the freedom to return to his former home in Beijing, Shan has just begun to settle into his menial job as an inspector of irrigation and sewer ditches in a remote Tibetan township when he encounters a wrenching crime scene. Strewn across the grounds of an old Buddhist temple undergoing restoration are the bodies of two unidentified men and a Tibetan nun. Shan quickly realizes that the murders pose a riddle the Chinese police might in fact be trying to cover up. When he discovers that a nearby village has been converted into a new internment camp for Tibetan dissidents arrested in Beijing's latest pacification campaign, Shan recognizes the dangerous landscape he has entered. To find justice for the victims and to protect an American woman who witnessed the murders, Shan must navigate through the treacherous worlds of the internment camp, the local criminal gang, and the government's rabid pacification teams, while coping with his growing doubts about his own identity and role in Tibet.

Mandarin Gate

The Edgar Award–winner’s colonial series continues as Scottish exile Duncan McCallum uncovers a loyalist conspiracy—“Historical mystery at its best” (Booklist, starred review). The American Colonies, 1765. As the Stamp Act dissent marks the first organized resistance to English rule, someone is kidnapping and killing members of the Iroquois Nation. Asked by an elder to investigate, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum soon uncovers a network of secret runners supporting the nascent “committees of correspondence,” engaged in the political dissent fomenting across colonial borders. But as Duncan follows the trail further, it leads to his capture. Thrown into slavery with the kidnapped runners, Duncan discovers a powerful conspiracy of highly placed English aristocrats bent on crushing all dissent. Inspired by an aged Native American slave and new African friends, Duncan decides not just to escape but to turn their own intrigue against the London lords. A Publishers Weekly Best Book, the fourth entry in the Bone Rattler series moves ever closer to the beginning of the American Revolution. With a cast of characters that includes Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, the early Pennsylvania rebel James Smith, and Dr. Benjamin Rush, Blood of the Oak takes a fresh view on the birth of the new American nation.

Eliot Pattison

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