This image is the cover for the book Chinese Bandit, The Far East Trilogy

Chinese Bandit, The Far East Trilogy

New York Times–bestselling author Stephen Becker’s “breathlessly exciting” (Cosmopolitan) post-WWII adventure about an ex-marine on the run for his life.

That summer they hanged a fat man at the Western gate as a warning and example to all.

Kao was a traitor, a thief, a pimp, a black marketeer—and Jake Dodds’s partner. So what if he traded stolen military supplies with the Japanese, Jake wants to know. He never cheated me. But 1947 Peking is a savage, cutthroat city, and the United States Marine Corps sergeant is too busy saving his own skin to put up a fight over Kao’s fate.

Jake served his country with honor in World War II, but when he knocks an American brigadier general through a barroom window, no amount of battlefield scars or combat medals will save him from prison. So he sets out across the Gobi Desert with a caravan of Kao’s illicit goods—and plunges into a world of violence and treachery that will take every ounce of his strength and intelligence to survive. Pursued by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army and a bandit chieftain named Tiger’s Assistant Demon, Jake disappears into the mountains—but the chaos of postwar China is inescapable, and “peace” has never been a part of this two-fisted adventurer’s vocabulary.

Gripping and rich with cinematic detail, The Chinese Bandit will please history buffs and thriller fans alike and “keep readers turning pages through the night” (Los Angeles Times).

The Chinese Bandit is the 1st book in the Far East Trilogy, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Stephen Becker

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel’s The Town Behind the Wall and André Malraux’s The Conquerors. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include A Covenant with Death (1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis; When the War Is Over (1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee’s surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels: The Chinese Bandit (1975), The Last Mandarin (1979), and The Blue-Eyed Shan (1982).

Open Road Integrated Media