The Secret Empress

About the Book

Joe Wilder is focused on turning a successful bodybuilding career into a billion-dollar international health and fitness conglomerate. He thinks he’s safely left behind his dangerous past as a CIA field agent—except for nightmares about gunfire, screams, and holding the lifeless body of a boy he cannot save. Facing massive price increases that could bankrupt his company, Joe travels to China for a confrontation with the ministry of trade. To his surprise, the deputy minister offers a deal in exchange for Joe helping her twelve-year-old son, Charley, travel to America. But when the minister is murdered within hours of signing the new contracts, Joe becomes both a suspect and the guardian of a boy with a secret. Relying on skills from his former life to stay alive, Joe has just four days to get Charley to safety before the most powerful criminal gang in China tracks them down. Hunted by every drug dealer, thug, and petty criminal who owes allegiance to the gang, can Joe and Charley survive long enough to see America? The Secret Empress is the gripping tale of an American entrepreneur’s dangerous quest to fulfill the last wish of a Chinese official before she is brutally murdered.

About the Author

Frank Heller has published biographical and exhibition catalogs on American and European artists, some of which are housed in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington, DC. He was a hospital corpsman in the US Navy during the early years of the Vietnam War. To write The Secret Empress, he drew on his thirty years of experience working in and traveling to China in the import business. Mr. Heller resides in Beverly Hills, where he is hard at work on his next thriller.