Second paragraph of third chapter:

Crouched on the other side of the bars, and still holding my hands, Nicholas Sabine gave a wry grin. ‘I know it’s not usual, Lucy, but there’s no law against it.’

I got this last autumn under the incorrect impression that it was set in Chengdu; in fact only the opening and the climax are set in China, and it’s near the fictional town of Chengfu, not the real city of Chengdu. (There is also a real Chengfu in Anhui Province, but it doesn’t fit the meagre description given.) So I put it aside, yet it bubbled to the top of my reading pile anyway. Destiny, or something.

It’s a romantic adventure story about young Lucy, abandoned in an orphanage in China, who finds herself sucked into a bizarre English feud between two neighbouring families over lost Chinese treasure. There are some vey effective fish-out-of-water moments for Lucy when she first arrives in England. The plot twists are pretty absurd, as hidden relatives turn up everywhere and Lucy returns to China to skip through the Boxer Rebellion, and yet I kept on being sucked back into it to find out what would happen next. I’m sure that the Chinese details are as wobbly as I know the English historical details are; but I admit that I was entertained anyway. You can get it here.

The author, “Madeleine Brent”, is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell, best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise series. I don’t think I have ever read any of them, but I might give them a try now.

Passes the Bechdel test easily in the first chapter, where Lucy is looking after the girls in the orphanage.

At the turn of the year this was my top unread non-genre book. Since then it has been way overtaken by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.