Shan Tao Yun is an exiled Chinese national, a former Beijing investigator, on parole from the Tibetan work camp to which he had been consigned as punishment. Summoned to a remote village to save a comatose man from summary execution for two murders, Shan discovers that the unconscious suspect is not Tibetan, but Navajo, and that the recent murders are only part of a chain of deaths. To find the killer, Shan must solve the riddle of Dragon Mountain, the place �where the world begins.�

Prayer of the Dragon (A Novel), Eliot Pattison, Soho Crime, Paperback, 369 pages, $ 14.00

Eliot Pattison is an international lawyer based near Philadelphia. His four previous Shan novels, set in Tibet, The Skull Mantra (St Martins 1999), Water Touching Stone (2001), Bone Mountain (2002) and Beautiful Ghosts (2004) have been critical and commercial successes. He won the Edgar for Best First Novel and was nominated for the CWA Golden Dagger