A police detective in Hong Kong races to solve a vicious murder, while the city around him teeters on the brink of destruction.
Hong Kong is a city ablaze—its streets filled with protesters, its government in crisis, its people torn between rage and fear of what defiance might cost. At the center stands Superintendent Killian Tong, once a rising star in the police, now disgraced and haunted by a tragic accident at a protest. Exiled to a remote post, Killian is called back when a dismembered body is uncovered in a landfill. The gruesome murder could be his path to redemption—if he can withstand mounting pressure from superiors desperate to bury the truth, and the even more dangerous fractures within his own family.
His beloved younger sister Jun refuses to speak to him, devoting herself to the protest movement. Once inseparable, the siblings now face each other across barricades, Jun’s fierce commitment pulling her closer to arrest and ruin.
As Killian follows the murder trail into Hong Kong’s highest corridors of power, he must confront not only the city’s corruption, but the searing question at his heart: When politics ignites a family war, can love survive the flames?
City on Fire is both a taut thriller and a deeply human story of loyalty, betrayal, and the search for redemption in a city under siege.
Simon Elegant is China bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Taiwan. Previously, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Asia including Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Elegant was the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, which won the 2019 readers’ choice award from TripAdvisor as the world’s best restaurant. He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), about China’s greatest poet, Li Bai, a novel that succeeded “in summoning up the man and his age in ways that are both deliciously foreign and all too familiar,” according to the New York Times.
Elegant will be in conversation with Kurt Campbell, a veteran U.S. diplomat and strategic strategist widely regarded as a chief architect of Washington’s “pivot to Asia.” He served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Barack Obama and later as the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator—often described as the administration’s “Asia czar”—under Joe Biden. Across these roles, he has been central to shaping U.S. policy toward China, blending engagement with strategic competition.
Campbell co-founded the Center for a New American Security and has held senior positions at the U.S. Department of State and White House National Security Council. His long experience in Asia policy has made him one of Washington’s most influential voices on China’s rise. Since leaving government in January 2025, Campbell has returned to The Asia Group South China Morning Post — the strategic advisory firm focused on the Asia-Pacific region that he co-founded in 2013 Wikipedia — resuming its chairmanship and making Hong Kong his first overseas stop, where he warned that US China policy under Trump risks dangerous miscalculation.