Racism was alive and well in 1932 when Walter C. Brown wrote this tale of intrigue in the drug trade. The police are caught between two opposing sides in the opium business, one run by a Greek mobster and the other by a wily Celestial cutthroat. And all of a sudden people start dying of a mysterious affliction that leaves a smile on their cold and dead lips. John Pelan warns you in his introduction that there's nothing funny about LAUGHING DEATH. Maybe he's right.