Hieronymous ('Harry') Bosch is one of the best-selling characters in contemporary fiction, a detective with the street sense to handle vicious criminals - yet his creator Michael Connelly is terrified of allowing the tortured tough guy to ride the Star Ferry.
Bosch has waited five years to spend an entire novel in Hong Kong with his daughter.
Connelly has known since 2004 that Harry needed time in Hong Kong, but he would rather keep his character in Los Angeles. The Bosch brand has gone around the world, in millions of copies of his 14 novels (translated into 35 languages) without leaving the city Connelly - and many of the top crime writers of the last century - knows best.
But Connelly realised from the first book that a literary franchise could leave home for one novel, if only on a tightly restricted visa. China seemed the perfect fit.
The Sunday Morning Post last spoke to Connelly in 2004, shortly after he decided Hong Kong would be the setting for Harry's 'fish out of water' tale. He was staking out Kowloon for the details of his novel: stealing the names of taxi drivers to create characters, writing down the fashionable colours of umbrellas, checking out Chungking Mansions, making notes on the smell and pattern of incense on the roof of Tin Hau Temple.
He returned to his home in Florida hoping to release it in 2006. It stalled when he realised Harry's daughter was too young for dramatic conversations. Connelly insists on moving Harry in close to real time. The Hong Kong novel had to wait until late this year, when the daughter would have the right teenage tension to unbalance her distant father.