The Man With No Time — Timothy Hallinan

In The Man With No Time, the fourth Simeon Grist novel, the erudite Los Angeles private eye does a favor for the family of his sometimes-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, and goes looking for two children who vanished in Chinatown. He quickly learns that he's gone straight through the looking glass and into a world where grieving parents are afraid to contact the police, where fear is the teacher and power is the law, where helpless people are shipped from China to America like so many pairs of shoes and forcedinto lives of toil and submission. If Simeon is an avenging knight, he's perilously out of his element, drawn into a back-alley nightmare of tong wars, slavery, and murder ??? forced to play by rules he doesn't understand for the highest stakes of all.