Outfoxed

Book excerpt: Sometimes Inspector William Fox likes to go off script, like when chasing gangsters in his cigarette boat on the St. Lawrence River. For one case, the RCMP officer with a penchant for luxury fashion finds himself teamed up with FBI Special Agent Patrick Reilly, an Irish lad who prefers absinthe to Guinness. The pair travel overseas to track down members of a gang who have kidnapped Tracy Jordan, an American academic and archeologist with teenage ties to William. In China, Tracy has been stealthily searching for evidence of Admiral Zheng He’s 15th-century connections to the area that would later be known as Nova Scotia. It’s here that Tracy and her team discover what might be Ming dynasty artifacts transported by Zheng He’s “massive treasure ships” left behind on Mi’kmaq peoples’ ancestral land. Outfoxed — a William Fox Adventure is a slick, globe-trotting adventure that involves the RCMP and FBI chasing the Foo Dog Triad operating in Hong Kong, mainland China, and New York City. Like Tracy and Kevin Steptoe, a Mi’kmaq lawyer, the gangsters are after the ancient Chinese treasures. Outfoxed is also a political thriller, diving deeply into the power struggles of the Communist Party of China and its shadowy operatives. It wades into the Fox family’s political past in South Korea, where a tragedy took place that still haunts William years later.