Black Fire

Hong Kong is heating up in 1993 as the Chinese government pressures the British to relinquish the city in advance of the 1997 deadline. Thousands of residents are fleeing via the impenetrably concealed ``Iron Underground,'' and the Chinese want to try their own methods to end the illegal emigrations. American journalist Doyle Mulligan is tailing Huang Mu, suspected kingpin of the Underground, when Huang is blown to bits in an airplane lavatory--landing Doyle in the thick of a deadly hunt, the ultimate target of which is Huang's client Han, a student leader of the Tiananmen Square uprising who is carrying unprecedented videotaped evidence of the Chinese army's atrocities. Will the tapes undo the Chinese campaign for Hong Kong? Doyle and Han's beautiful cousin face mortal danger as the Chinese unleash Black Fire, an almost mythical martial-arts assassin who will stop at nothing to capture Han. The verisimilitude of the book's Hong Kong setting offsets the improbable, sometimes ludicrous violence of the shadowy villain, and readers who can get past the awkward attempts at humor and the facile politics will lose themselves in the action. Fox is the pseudonym of Stephen Forbes ( False Cross ). (May)