A disappearance and a tangled knot of sex and politics involving a stripper and Singapore’s former chief minister.

Sydney, 1966. Flower power is in full swing. The Cold War is at its height.

Somewhere in Kings Cross, Singapore’s former Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock is missing. Now the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia, he had left his home in Canberra without a word of where he had gone.

Is he dead? During his reign as Chief Minister, he had cracked down hard on the Communists, and they will want to settle scores with him. Is he in hiding from mounting debts? Lim is known for his punts on the horses on weekends.
Or is he mixed up in Cold War espionage? One of his ministers, Chew Swee Kee, was alleged to have received money from the CIA – and there’re rumours Lim had his share of it.

And how is a 19-year-old stripper, Sandra Nelson, Russian by birth, involved in this shady business? Is she Lim’s honey trap?

Private detective Dave Chen has to unravel these tangled knots of political intrigue and personal trauma – and confront his own demons.

Written in poetic form by Felix Cheong and wonderfully illustrated by Arif Rafhan, The Showgirl and the Minister is inspired by the real-life disappearance of Lim over ten days in 1966.