Leather wrote his fourth novel, "The Chinaman", while working as night news editor on the business desk of "The Times" in London. At the time, the Provisional Irish Republican Army's bombing campaign was at its height, and in "The Chinaman", a Sino-Vietnamese man loses his family in an attack loosely based on the bombing of the Harrods department store in London. Having been turned away by the authorities, the man, a highly decorated Special Forces fighter in the Vietnam War, travels to Ireland and hunts down the people responsible. The book was used as the basis for the 2017 thriller "The Foreigner".