The Dead Can’t Make a Living

A unique blend of tension, charm, tragedy, and optimism, with characters you ll love and a setting so real you ll think you ve been there. Highly recommended.' - Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series. Jing-nan, the owner of the most popular food stand in Taipei's world-famous Shilin night market, is hauling trash after a successful evening of hawking Taiwanese delicacies to tourists when he finds a corpse propped up against the dumpsters. The dead man turns out to be Juan Ramos, a Philippine national who came to Taiwan for a job at a massive ZHD food processing plant. Jing-nan is haunted by Ramos's story, and by the heartbreak of his family, who arrive in Taipei looking for answers. ZHD has a history of safety violations, and activists have a hunch Ramos's death might be part of a cover-up. Meanwhile, Jing-nan's gangster uncle, Big Eye, has his own mysterious, probably illegal, reasons for being concerned about what's going on in ZHD. He pressures Jing-nan into a daring and risky mission: going undercover as a migrant laborer to get a job at the food processing plant and report back about the conditions inside. Jing-nan hopes to find out the truth for the Ramos family, and to save other immigrant lives but first he has to survive the spy operation. THE DEAD CAN'T MAKE A LIVING is at once a rollicking crime novel and a scorchingly timely examination of our global dependence on undocumented immigrants and the inhumane labor conditions that underpin modern conveniences.