Book excerpt: Stolen art, murder, and international intrigue—the 2nd installment in John P. Marquand’s popular espionage series is an evocative portrait of 1930s Peking Tom Nelson, a jaded American expatriate, stumbles into a deadly conspiracy as tensions between Japan and China threaten to escalate into all-out war. When a British ex–army major trafficking in stolen goods is murdered, the beautiful American art dealer Eleanor Joyce is implicated in the crime. The search for the real killer leads Tom and Eleanor straight into the clutches of General Wu Lo Feng, a notorious warlord from the North who has surreptitiously entered Peking as part of a secret plan with global implications. Feng will stop at nothing to silence the American pair. Their only hope for survival is Mr. Moto, a secret agent of Imperial Japan who is onto the general’s scheme. But can Tom and Eleanor trust the enigmatic spymaster, or are they fated to be pawns in a plot whose stakes are as monumental as they are sinister? First serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, John P. Marquand’s popular and acclaimed Mr. Moto Novels were the inspiration for 8 films starring Peter Lorre.