Linda Frank, American Jewish author, launched her second detective book revolving around her fictional female sleuth, Lily Kovner, the Jewish Miss Marple.

This thriller covers the 3 strands of Chinese Jews: the authentic Chinese Jews, Jews from Iraq who migrated to India and from there to China and the Russian Jews who arrived in Shanghai during WWII

A new historical-fiction thriller with journalist-turned-amateur-sleuth Lily Kovner, crowned "The Jewish Miss Marple," on the trail of a historic Iraqi Torah scroll which has gone missing from the home of a Chinese official in Shanghai.
The book relates to the Sephardi Jews who went from Baghdad to India and thence to China.
The story has both personal and political implications.

Linda Frank - celebrates the publication of her second novel featuring the fictional Lily Kovner . In the first, entitled, "After the Auction," Lily searched for an antique seder plate, a treasure looted by the Nazis from her family home. This plight mirrors a widespread Jewish experience that's an ongoing subject of interest, due to recent films, showing real cases that continue seventy years after the end of World War II. The historical context of both books reflects the extensive research and expertise of author Linda Frank on looted art and the history of Jewish settlement in China, including those that came from Baghdad, Russia and pre-Holocaust Europe, as well as the so-called "real Chinese Jews" of Kaifeng.

For Linda's lecture, the hall was packed with people, some of whom added their own or their family's history to Linda's account.

The story of one city in China that included Iraqi Jews, Chinese Jews and Eastern European Jews has illustrated one of the most important aspects of Jewish life mainly that all these strands which on the face of it divide us, cannot take away the fact that we are one nation with a similar historical past throughout the diaspora