Wuhan, 1926. Civil war has reached the Yangtze. A Nationalist army sweeps north out of Canton, warlord regimes crumble ahead of it, and foreign gunboats ride at anchor off the Hankow bund while inside the concessions the great powers watch one another across the river.
Second Lieutenant Jack Gaines came out to protect American lives and property, not to involve himself in other men's secrets. Then a Japanese businessman who claims to trade in wood oil keeps turning up where he has no business being, and no one in the trade has heard his name. Following that thread leads Jack to the Black Ocean Society, an ultranationalist brotherhood that keeps a spy network across China which the Imperial Japanese Army finds useful and prefers to keep unofficial.
It also leads him to Natalya Rosenberg, an American reporter with a sharp tongue, leftist sympathies, and a past she keeps to herself. Together they begin to pull apart a blackmail conspiracy far larger than it first appears, one that runs through the city's Chinese gangsters, Japanese and Soviet intelligence, and up into the consulates.
It turns on the Dragon Gate Teahouse, a place of silk curtains and whispered bargains, where reputations are bought and men are bent to another power's purposes. As artillery pounds Wuchang across the river and old alliances come apart, Jack and Natalya have to reach the truth before the men protecting it reach them. What draws them together may be the thing that ruins them both.
In a city where spies bargain with gangsters, neutrality is not safety. It is surrender.
This is a historical espionage thriller set in a China most Western readers have never encountered. Readers who enjoyed the period accuracy of Patrick O'Brian, the moral unease of Graham Greene, and the sweeping scale of James Clavell will love The Dragon Gate Conspiracy.