Publisher's Synopsis
In June 2006, police were called to a house in Hampstead to investigate reports of unusual card activity. The owner of the house, Allan Chappelow, was an award-winning photographer and biographer, an expert on George Bernard Shaw and a notorious recluse, who had not been seen for several weeks. Inside the darkened house officers found piles of rubbish and, in what was once the living room, the body of Chappelow. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam: a man who claimed to be the grandson of one of Mao's closest aides. Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, interviewing key witnesses, the investigating officers, forensic experts and the journalists who broke the story, and has unearthed shocking and revelatory new material on the killing, the victim and the supposed perpetrator.
