Brand-name thriller
"Robert Ludlum's The Altman Code" is part of a growing trend in which publishers harness the name and reputation of a veteran writer to promote works in a similar genre, which in Ludlum's case would be spy thrillers.
A renegade member of China's Standing Committee has arranged to supply Iraq with a shipload of chemicals for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. The United States doesn't dare move to intercept the ship until its intelligence agents can obtain a copy of the manifest. Based on a clue scribbled on a Starbucks napkin, U.S. agent Jon Smith -- an awfully suspicious name for a spy -- heads for Shanghai to obtain the incriminating document. To find this veritable needle in a haystack, Uncle Sam, incredibly, assigns a Caucasian agent who sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn't know a word of Chinese. The narrative, of course, has been rendered obsolete by subsequent events. Ludlum's fans probably won't care, since they'll be getting a classic Ludlum-style thriller -- even if the setting, story and characters are implausible and the author was someone else.
"Shanghai" takes place in 1939 -- the period between the Marco Polo Bridge incident and the outbreak of the Pacific War. Newly arrived American journalist Josh Miller meets Julie Grant, the half-Chinese daughter of an antique merchant, and the two unexpectedly find themselves wrapped up in the struggle involving local Chinese thugs and the Japanese kempeitai (military police) for a priceless sarcophagus looted from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang,the first emperor.