Casey Walker's first novel tells congressional aide Luke Slade's story of a botched five-day meet-and-greet for his boss, California Congressman Leo Fillmore, arranged and funded by Fillmore's wealthy benefactor Armand Lightborn. Luke has no romantic illusions about playing a role in shaping the future of the world. He knows his job is to keep his boss away from liquor long enough to stay on schedule--"to prevent, as much as I could, full public knowledge of the crooked timber he was made from." After perfunctory visits to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, followed by yet another hard-drinking dinner, Fillmore goes off the rails and disappears on a bender, leaving Luke to stand in during key negotiations over a Chinese contract to build an airport in Fillmore's district. Luke inadvertently accepts a briefcase of cash to "facilitate" the deal, becomes implicated in the death of a regional Chinese mayor, and winds up in Shanghai with no sign of Fillmore or Lightborn and only the pretty translator Li-Li to help him untangle things and get his man back home in one piece with reputation intact.
Last Days in Shanghai displays a good deal of cynicism about the "Chinese economic miracle" and the United States' naïve efforts to exploit it. But it's also a perceptive novel about the old giving way to the new and of one young man's attempts to find an abiding moral center in the heady swirl of a Washington-Beijing axis of money, power, women and corruption. Walker dances with the big global superpowers and waltzes away with a suspenseful modern story of sin, subterfuge and redemption. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.