Foul Lady Fortune

Foul Lady Fortune is a young adult historical fantasy novel by the New Zealand author Chloe Gong, published through Margaret K. McElderry Books on 27 September 2022, and the first book of a spin-off series.

Shanghai in 1931 is a city of intrigue, and Rosalind Lang is one of its stranger products. Four years before the novel opens she was brought back from death by an experiment that left her unable to sleep or age and able to heal from any injury, so she cannot die. She is desperate for redemption for a past in which she was a traitor, and she uses her abilities as an assassin for her country under the code name Fortune. When the Japanese Imperial Army begins its march, her missions change: a series of murders is destabilising the city, the Japanese are the obvious suspects, and Rosalind is ordered to infiltrate foreign society and find whoever is behind the killings. To reduce suspicion she must pose as the wife of a man she does not trust, which puts her in the middle of an intelligence operation with no clean way out.

Gong writes historical fantasy with the machinery of espionage, and the novel's plot is driven by a period of Chinese history in which loyalties were genuinely dangerous.