Death by Godiva: The Fatal Sin of Love Brings a Whole New Meaning to "Dark Chocolate" in G. X. Chen's New Murder Mystery

    BOSTON, MA, March 13, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Somebody's killing chocolate lovers in Boston and China. When a wealthy Back Bay widow dies in her sleep, nobody suspects that it's just the beginning of a carefully laid out plot to hijack the multimillion dollar inheritance that the Chinese American dowager left to members of her far-flung family. Nobody, that is, except amateur detectives Ann Lee and Fang Chen who author G. X. Chen brings delightfully back for more in The Fatal Sin of Love (Back Bay Press, paper, $11.50), her engrossing new sequel to The Mystery of Moutai (Back Bay Investigation).

Chen's considerable strengths (Kirkus Reviews called The Mystery of Moutai "a conventional murder mystery made truly exceptional thanks to the charismatic and refreshingly unconventional protagonists") are back in full force in a thriller that takes the reader on an insider's tour from tony Back Bay Boston across the world to remote mountain villages in mainland China.

"The key to a good murder mystery is always the interplay between characters and plot," says Chen who admits to being a rabid murder mystery fan, ranking Agatha Christie among her favorite authors. "I write mystery novels because I like to read them. I find that tapping my Chinese heritage also adds a dimensionality--and exoticism--that I sometimes long for in the many murder mysteries I read."

Chen, now an American citizen, is almost a living embodiment of the history of Communist China. Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, she returned to the mainland in 1965 for a visit and was unable to leave again for decades. "It was right before the Cultural Revolution when I visited my family," says Chen who now lives in Boston with her husband. "As soon as it started, everyone was so afraid of anything Western--including my parents, who burned all of my Western clothes, and more importantly, my passport." Living in China under the Communists wasn't easy, though Chen managed to become a "best-selling" author after the Cultural Revolution ended. "Best-selling in China then meant sales of at least 80,000 copies. Not a lot in a nation which then had three quarters of a billion people, though, at that time nearly half the population was illiterate."

Chen, who holds a master's degree in literature from The University of New Mexico, left China for good in 1989 after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. "It was no place for my young daughter to grow up," she says, remembering the difficulty of obtaining a student visa that enabled her and her five-year-old to travel to the U.S. Once in the states, she never looked back, laying writing aside to work a number of jobs that put her daughter through Harvard College and Harvard Business School. "It was the classic immigrant story in many ways," says Chen who worked to pay for everything from private school and piano lessons to give her daughter a clean start in the land of opportunity. "I had to quit writing to make money to raise her, which I managed to do without even saddling her with a single student loan."

An American success story to be sure, but also an opportunity for Chen to start writing again. "As soon as she was done with college, I was bored out of my mind," recalls Chen. The logical thing was to take up writing again, which she did with relish. The Fatal Sin of Love is Chen's fourth American novel and more are on the horizon.

"Writing mysteries is my retirement plan," she says. Given her talents, it's no mystery how they're likely to be received.

G. X. Chen, author of The Mystery of Revenge, The Mystery of Moutai, and Forget Me Not: A Love Story of the East, is a freelance writer who loves reading, traveling, and orchids. A graduate of Fudan University and University of New Mexico, she has taught literature at Fudan as well as Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. She lives in the beautiful city of Boston with her husband, Steve.

For more information, visit www.gxchen.tateauthor.com.

Media contact: Victor Gulotta
Gulotta Communications, Inc.
617-630-9286
http://www.booktours.com
victor(at)booktours(dot)com

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