Shanghai, 1926. A city glistening with decadence and rife with corruption -- a humid, bustling society at the cultural crossroads of British civil servants, American gun runners, Russian princesses, and Chinese gangsters.

For Richard Field, a young Englishman new to the international police force, Shanghai represents a brave new world away from the past he is trying to escape. But his naïveté is quickly dashed when he is called to the scene of a brutal crime, in which a young Russian woman, Lena Orlov, has been found sadistically murdered in her bed. Field's idealistic instincts push him to investigate the case, but his attempts are met with apathy -- then menace -- from his colleagues. He begins to recognize that some cases in Shanghai are intended to remain unsolved, and, in a matter of days, he glimpses the murky depths that lurk beneath a luminous city.

Field's drive to find the murderer leads him to Lena's neighbor, Natasha Medvedev. A stunning beauty who fled her charmed life in tsarist Russia, Natasha escaped the Revolution but landed, like many of her counterparts, in a treacherous life in Shanghai. Natasha travels in an elite circle -- one that orbits, Field knows, around the city's most feared drug lord, Lu Huang. As his attraction to the beguiling Natasha grows, he is faced with a piercing question: can he trust someone whose only goal is self-preservation? And is it wise to fall in love with a woman who may herself be the next victim?

Trusting only his Chicago-hardened American partner, Caprisi, Field follows leads that run into the heart of a lawlessly corrupt city, slowly uncovering a web of deception that will leave him reeling.

In The Master of Rain, Tom Bradby weaves a taut, atmospheric crime novel that doles out surprising turns until the last suspenseful page.