“These novels are a wonderful pagoda, built by the only person in our literature for whom the division of the world into West and East simply does not exist,” said Leonid Yuzefovich about Master Chen’s trilogy about the spy Amalia de Souza. The first book of the series has a strange story with a chain of murders in the Penang colony, Amalia de Souza, a subject of the British Empire and an enthusiastic daughter of the “Jazz Age,” turns into a smart detective and also a hopelessly in love young lady. She plunges into an unsteady world: ethnographers who turn out to be spies; rickshaw pullers, who are engaged in far more sinister activities than transporting passengers; writers who are more than writers... And she herself, as it turns out, is far from just the administrator of the Elise cabaret.