Home
Novels
Writing Questions
Empires of Sand
China Run
Ironfire
Sign the Guestbook!

Contact David
via E-mail

Book Reviews
Foreign & Recorded
Book Origins
Photo Gallery
Read Chapter 1
Links
Community Reading

Buy it now at:

or through

 

The chilling, suspenseful story of a mother, her newly adopted child, and the foreign government trying to separate them ...

"What a setup!  When the Chinese government wants to take back the baby that an American woman has just adopted, she goes on the run with no knowledge of Chinese and the full power of a police state against her.  David Ball makes this edge-of-the-seat chase tale completely believable.  China Run is original, brilliant, and breathtaking!"   

                 -- Phillip Margolin, NY Times bestselling author

       "An exotic tale...wonderfully orchestrated...
                Poignant…riveting..."

                                                                --USA Today

"A thriller that's gotten in touch with its feminine side..."

                                              --The Asia Review of Books

A featured alternate of the Book-of-the-Month Club,
the Mystery Guild, the Literary Guild, and the Doubleday Book Club.

 

    For Allison Turk, the journey to China to claim the daughter she is adopting has been a trying experience, a series of false starts and long waits.  Forced to travel without her husband, she makes the trip with her nine-year-old stepson.  She hopes it will be a bonding experience, but it isn’t working out.

     When she finally holds the little girl in her arms, however, she knows it has been worth all the effort and aggravation. In only two days, she will board a plane for home, taking with her the greatest prize and joy she has ever known.

     Suddenly everything unravels. Summoned to an emergency meeting of the adoptive parents, Allison is told a mistake has been made—a “clerical error.” The Americans have been given healthy infants rather than children with special needs, for which they are technically qualified, and are told they must exchange their babies for different children. Allison is faced with a terrible decision: should she capitulate and surrender the child she has come to love intensely, or risk an attempt to reach the American consulate in Shanghai, where she might at least have a chance to negotiate and keep her baby?

     Joining with several other American couples caught in the same dilemma, Allison chooses to run.  There is a more sinister reason underlying the nightmare than they know about, and their flight spawns a massive manhunt led by a ruthless police colonel wielding all the terrifying apparatus of a police state.  What ensues is tense, dramatic and totally believable—a race in which Allison not only struggles with her infant daughter and recalcitrant stepson, but is caught in a political tug-of-war that forces her to display a depth of courage and a strength of will she had never known she possessed.

     Inspired by a true-life incident, China Run takes the reader on a breathtaking chase across China that is gripping, compulsively readable, and frighteningly real.

"Allison realized she'd been awake for twenty-four hours.  She hadn't done that since college. It had been the most remarkable twenty-four hours of her life - hours in which for better of worse, a choice had been made, a line crossed.  There was no going back.  Each time she thought about it, she felt the same strange shock:  She was a straitlaced civil engineer from Denver, huddled in the bowels of a broken-down cargo boat on the Wŕn Li Chang Jiang, the Yangtze River.  Hunted by the police, with her stepson and a baby that wasn't legally hers. 

With all that, she wasn't even heading toward Shanghai, toward home.  Instead she was heading upriver, even deeper into the heart of China...