A murder in New York's diamond district; a dead Chinese girl with a photograph in her pocket; a plastic bag of irradiated heroin lying on the mantelpiece in an empty apartment; a fire in a sweatshop in the city's swarming Chinatown; the worst blizzard in New York history.These events conspire to bring ex-cop Artie Cohen out of retirement and back into an obsessive world of murder and politics that nearly killed him. Artie's struggles to link them take him from New York, his own back yard, to Hong Kong, site of the last big grab on earth, where everything, and everyone, is for sale.