The Chinese Sailor

The Chinese Sailor is the first Catrin Sayer full-length detective mystery.

A Chinese naval officer from Hong Kong goes missing from a cruise ship while it visits the Welsh port of Holyhead and a missing person investigation turns up no leads. An international police operation to break an art smuggling ring loses track of three stolen Russian paintings worth $2 million; they disappear from the same ship, on the same cruise. Four months later Jian Li Yeung, the younger sister of the missing sailor, starts a year of study at Bangor University, the closest university to the point of disappearance of her brother. The Metropolitan Police Art Crime Unit wants to know why she is in the UK and whether it has any bearing on their case.

Constable Catrin Sayer is looking for promotion and a new role away from drug squad work in Brixton and her application crosses the desk of the Art Crime Unit as they look for a way to find out more. Coincidence and her Welsh background lead Catrin to agree to go undercover and assist the investigation. Sayer is twenty-four at the time; keen, ambitious, trying to balance her work as a police officer with her interests as an artist. From her short-term undercover role to working on a team trying to discover the fate of both the paintings and the missing sailor, she finds herself adjusting to new challenges, new relationships and the meaning of becoming a ‘detective constable' at New Scotland Yard.