The Last Mandarin (2024) is a political thriller co-authored by Louise Penny and Mellissa Fung. Penny is the celebrated author of the bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series and co-wrote the political thriller State of Terror with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Fung is a veteran journalist, filmmaker, and author with extensive experience covering international conflicts, particularly in Afghanistan, where she was once held hostage. In the novel, a series of destructive global cyberattacks is linked to the murder of a young CIA agent. This pulls his friend, food blogger Alice Li, into a high-stakes conspiracy alongside her estranged mother, Vivien, a world-famous Chinese dissident who has her own complex ties to US intelligence.

As mother and daughter navigate a web of espionage that stretches from Washington, DC, to the sealed tomb of China’s first emperor, they must confront their family’s traumatic past to stop a catastrophic final attack. The novel explores themes including The Tension Between Family Loyalty and Personal Morality, examining how impossible choices made for survival can fracture relationships for generations. Weaving in real-world political and historical events, from China’s Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square protests, the story highlights The Lasting Consequences of Generational Trauma. The plot also reflects contemporary anxieties about geopolitics, delving into the theme of Combating Information Warfare in the Digital Era through its depiction of state-sponsored hacking, cognitive sabotage, and the weaponization of artificial intelligence.

This guide refers to the 2024 Minotaur Books edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, death by suicide, and death.

Plot Summary

Alice Li, a 26-year-old food blogger, endures a tense brunch in Washington, DC, with her estranged mother, Vivien Li, a world-famous Chinese dissident. Alice is more interested in her upcoming meeting with Liam Palmer, a friend from Columbia University on whom she has a crush, who is returning from a business trip to Hong Kong. He has sent her a cryptic text with a photo of himself on the Star Ferry holding a coconut bun, some Chinese characters for “fish balls,” and a misspelled reference to Cheung Chau island. While Alice takes refuge in the restaurant’s bathroom, a civil defense alarm blares from every phone, quickly joined by every security, fire, and vehicle alarm in the city. In the ensuing pandemonium, Alice and Vivien escape the hotel just as the alarms cease globally. News reports reveal that the event was a coordinated worldwide cyberattack. Vivien, unusually secretive, takes Alice to her Georgetown home, where she is abruptly summoned by government agents. To Alice’s surprise, Vivien insists she accompany them to the White House for an urgent meeting with top national security officials, including Director of National Intelligence Grant McAllister and, eventually, President Fraser Pardington.

In the secure meeting room, the officials reveal that Liam Palmer has been found drowned in Hong Kong harbor, an apparent murder connected to the global alarm, which they have traced to China. They display Liam’s final message to Alice, confirming that they have access to his communications. Vivien shocks the room by identifying two men in Liam’s ferry photo as agents of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), raising doubts about Liam’s loyalties. She theorizes that the attack is a warning from a rogue faction, not state-sanctioned, suggesting that President Chen Jiayang is losing control. In the car home, Vivien uses nonverbal communication to instruct Alice to investigate Liam’s past, starting with his family’s address. Alice travels to New York, meeting with college friends and learning that Liam had a life-threatening allergy, which they recall as being to shellfish. She then flies to Akron, Ohio, where she meets Liam’s mother, Mary, and his adopted Chinese sister, Mae. They give her a package Liam mailed from Hong Kong containing a crudely painted glass ornament known as a li bien ball. Alice realizes Liam’s allergy was not to shellfish but to coconut, making the coconut bun he held in his final photo a deliberate message. Her investigation is cut short by a second, more destructive global attack: Every elevator in the world freezes simultaneously, then plummets, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The world teeters on the brink of war with China. Vivien, using a fake Singaporean passport under the name Florence Ng, flies to Xi’an, the suspected origin of the attacks. Alice discovers her mother’s plan and follows. In Xi’an, Vivien is apprehended by the head of the MSS, Wang Lai, and taken to an excavation site near the Terracotta Army—an army of terracotta warriors buried in the 3rd century BCE by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and discovered by archaeologists in 1974. There, she is met by her ex-husband, Liu Tongzheng, a man she and her children believed had died in a car crash years ago. Liu is a high-ranking MSS official poised to replace the increasingly erratic Wang. He reveals that he and Vivien co-founded a pro-democracy network called Pangu—after a god of creation and destruction from ancient Chinese mythology—after the Tiananmen Square protests, but it has since been usurped by a militant faction responsible for the attacks. He also confesses that Vivien’s brother, Kai-wen—whom Vivien has long thought dead as a result of Liu’s betrayal—is alive and in hiding in Taiwan. Just then, Alice, having been kidnapped in Hong Kong, is brought to the site, leading to a shocking reunion. During a third attack—a global blackout—Liu helps Vivien and Alice escape, directing them to Taiwan to find Kai-wen while he remains to investigate Pangu.

In Taipei, amidst the chaos of the blackout’s aftermath, Vivien and Alice find Kai-wen running a noodle bar named Peach Blossom Spring with his wife, Ming-na. He is the secret informant Vivien has been communicating with for years. Kai-wen confirms that he met with Liam, who was piecing together Pangu’s plot involving a global network of food distribution companies linked by blockchain technology. Liam’s cryptic messages were a trail: The coconut bun in his photo was from The Last Mandarin Bakery in Hong Kong, a hub for Liu’s informant network run by his great-aunt, Gugu. The list of implicated corporations was hidden on a paper snake inside the li bien ball, whose painted image was a copy of a mural from a Taipei museum where Kai-wen often sought refuge. Realizing Gugu is a key Pangu leader, the group, now a foursome, returns to Hong Kong. At the bakery, Auntie Gugu reveals that she, not Liu, now leads the new, ultranationalist Pangu. She orchestrates a final, catastrophic attack: using APAI, a powerful adaptive predictive artificial intelligence, to seize control of the US Navy’s nuclear missiles and launch them at Beijing during the National People’s Congress, framing the US and clearing the way for Pangu to restore an imperialist China.

Alice deduces that Pangu’s high-tech headquarters must be hidden inside the sealed, booby-trapped tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang in Xi’an. The group, joined by two loyal MSS officers, Captain Hu and Corporal Song, flies back and breaks into the tomb, a vast, subterranean necropolis filled with treasure, rivers of mercury, and the skeletal remains of its builders. They find Pangu’s command center just as the final countdown for the missile launch begins. Ming-na risks her life to create a diversion, and Alice corners the lead programmer. After he is killed by one of the emperor’s ancient traps, Alice recovers his laptop. The code to abort the launch is written in Nüshu, a secret language invented by Chinese women. Recalling a unique symbol on the li bien ball that Liam had marked, Alice enters the single-character code with only seconds to spare, stopping the attack. As they escape, Alice triggers a mechanism that collapses the tomb’s entrance, sealing the remaining terrorists inside with their dead emperor. Meanwhile, President Pardington, receiving intelligence from Alice via a secret channel established by President Chen, correctly identifies his Chief of Staff, Kathleen Wells, as the high-level Pangu traitor in the White House, though he initially pretends to be fooled by Wells’s attempt to frame Secretary of Defense Joanne Clavelle.

With the Pangu conspiracy foiled, the primary leaders are arrested. Auntie Gugu is apprehended at her bakery, and Kathleen Wells is taken into custody in the Oval Office. The world begins to recover, the fragile alliance between the US and China holding as they dismantle the rest of the terrorist network. Kai-wen and Ming-na return to their quiet life in Taipei, secretly enriched by a few treasures from the emperor’s tomb. Alice and Vivien fly back to DC, where they are reunited with Liu, who has left the MSS to join his family. At Vivien’s home, Alice finds her father and her brother, Kevin, cooking together. As she listens to her mother softly playing Brahms’s “Lullaby” on the piano—a melody she’d always associated with her father—Alice realizes it was Vivien who soothed her to sleep all those years ago. Surrounded by her now-complete family, she watches as the long-broken bridge between mother and daughter finally begins to mend.