Hong Kong, 1953: In a remote mansion, witnesses insist a massacre took place. The police see nothing but pristine rooms and declare it a collective hallucination. Until decades later, when one witness returns…from the Edgar®-nominated author of The Last Russian Doll.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Kristen Loesch’s The Hong Kong Widow, which releases on October 7th 2025.
In 1950s Hong Kong, Mei is a young refugee of the Chinese Communist revolution struggling to put her past in Shanghai behind her. When she receives a shocking invitation—to take part in a competition in one of the city’s most notorious haunted houses, pitting six spirit mediums against one another in a series of six séances over six nights, until a single winner emerges—she has every reason to refuse.
Except that the hostess, a former Shanghainese silent film star, is none other than the wife of the man who once destroyed Mei’s entire life.
It is promised the winner will receive a fortune, but there is only one prize Mei wants: revenge.
Decades later, the final night of that competition has become an infamous urban legend: The police were called to the scene of a brutal massacre but found no evidence, dismissing it as a collective hallucination. Mei knows what she saw, but now someone else is convinced they know what she did. She must uncover the truth about the last night she ever spent in that house—even if the ghosts of her past are waiting for her there. . . .
Excerpted from THE HONG KONG WIDOW by Kristen Loesch
Seattle, Washington, 2015
Susanna has her lips pursed, like she is sucking on sweet root. I am telling her what it is like to be attacked by an unknown assailant in a darkened room. How it feels to wake up a few hours later, your head throbbing, one eye swollen shut, lying flat on a tatami, the straw beneath you turned sticky, your arms stiff at your sides, your fingers bent like you’re holding a ball. One of those small spleeny organs that nobody knows about until they lose it, you’ve lost it.
You know it’s normal not to be able to recall anything of the attack itself. Normal if you can’t picture your attacker; normal if everything is hazy in your head.
The problem is that it isn’t.
Imagine that you remember the events of your attack perfectly—but you remember it all the wrong way around. In your memory you see yourself on the ground, bleeding badly; in your memory you go closer, bending over your own form, your own face.
In your memory, you are not the victim. You are the attacker.
“Uh huh,” Susanna says, jotting something down on her handheld electronic screen.
Susanna Thornton is an award-winning author of narrative non-fiction, known for her interest in murky historical mysteries, particularly crimes. Why else has she sat me down like this, if not for a story like this one? Her initial request for an interview was shocking; her voice on the phone was clipped and stern and gave nothing away. But she can’t just want the usual bland impressions of the decades I have lived through, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the Pacific War, the Chinese Communist Revolution.
I want her to want more.
I want to see her innate curiosity piqued. I want to hear her laugh openly at me. I want her to tell me that it’s impossible, what I have just said, all while her mind spins with possibilities.
But it seems she has little concern for the darkened rooms of my life.
“I want to talk about Hong Kong,” Susanna says. “About Maidenhair House.”
For a moment it feels as if I am waking up a few hours later, all over again.
“I’m sorry. I must have misheard you,” I say.
“Maidenhair House,” repeats Susanna, whose voice is very clear, whose voice regularly carries over the heads of hundreds of people. She waits, as if for a reaction, and then: “About the late summer night in 1953 that’s turned into an urban legend. About the alleged massacre. About how, when the police were called to the scene, they couldn’t find a trace of it—and later called it a collective hallucination.”
“Then what is left to say?” I ask, but perhaps she can hear my heart beating slightly faster, just by my voice.
“It’s been confirmed that several young women went up to the house that night and were never seen again,” says Susanna. “Women who were refugees of the Revolution. Women with no family or friends. Women that nobody would have missed. I’ve spoken to some Canadian urban explorers who spent a night at Maidenhair about fifteen years back now,” she adds, with a hint of satisfaction, “and I got one of them to admit that there was indeed blood. When they went over it with Luminol, they found blood everywhere. Walls. Floors. Rugs.”
She says this like it is a revelation, blood beneath your feet.
Maybe in this country it is.
But in the place I come from, the dirt is always red, if you dig deep enough.
The balloon-whistle of the espresso maker sounds from another room, but Susanna doesn’t budge. She thinks the silence will force me to speak. She sweeps her long mat of hair behind her shoulders. I have thought of other things to tell by now: Perhaps about the time my mother forced me to sell my own hair to a visitor to our village, who was trying to grow his collection of female braids; how much I wanted to refuse; how if I were not so tragically proud, I might have begged. But we needed the money and in the end Ma got her way. She cut it just above the jaw.
“I intend to solve it,” says Susanna.
She can get my hair back for me?
Even if by now it is scattered across China like ashes?
“I’m going to uncover the truth about Maidenhair,” she insists. I am not sure this is an interview so much as it is a sounding board, because clearly the story she wants to tell is already formed in her head. I can see it shining in her eyes. “I’ll do it with your help or without it, Mama, but I’m going to find out what happened that night. And I’m going to find out why you got away.”
Excerpted from The Hong Kong Widow by Kristen Loesch Copyright © 2025 by Kristen Loesch. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
