Set in Changi, Singapore, this novel follows 3-4 main characters and their schemes within Japanese POW camp policed by captured officers.

• Peter Marlowe (loosely based on Clavell himself!) a high class officer who gets caught up in the King's schemes
• The King, an enterprising American enlisted man who finds great success in the camp as a black market entrepreneur (his main schemes being the sale of a diamond, as well as breeding rats and secretly selling their meat as some other fowl),
• Sean, the trans actress (such a zany B-plot that this had to have been a real thing that happened in Clavell's camp)
• and Peter Grey, one of the Camp's MPs who antagonizes the King and Marlowe, but is always somehow one step behind

// TODO: somewhere towards the end of chapter 3 is a fire Malay insult

This book is by far the most intense of the _Asian Saga_so far. Marlowe is instrumental in the diamond deal, and hides the money while a gangrenous infection becomes so bad that he experiences delirium the King has to procure illicit antitoxins and administer them to Marlowe who needs to recover quickly so as to recover the $ he hid outside the camp to pull off the deal.

There are numerous tense scenes where prisoners are nearly caught with contraband (namely a radio that they use to receive intel about the war effort), and the book ends on a presciently difficult re-entry into normal life, describing the King as:

a man torn from teh womb of Changi

and the book concluding with the neglected rats feasting on one another.

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