In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild East”—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation.
Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
Writer, historian, genealogist, and retired corporate executive
Scott is an award-winning writer, a historian and a former corporate executive who holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton and a master’s degree from Harvard. Now based in Washington, DC, he spent much of his career in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, is fluent in Mandarin and reads and writes Chinese. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, managed a multinational public relations agency in China, and served as spokesperson and communications director for a Fortune 50 company. He has taught English in Taiwan and Chinese in Washington.
Scott has written four books on early Chinese-Americans and co-authored a Chinese cookbook and a Chinese phrasebook for travelers. His 2018 work, The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, about a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, DC in 1919, won the gold medal in history in the 2019 Independent Publisher 2019 Book Awards, and his most recent work, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, was a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards.
